The Ironic Birth of Waterfall

Did you know that the birth of the waterfall software development methodology is a thing of irony?  I was working on a presentation on agile software development when I looked deeper into the history of the waterfall methodology. Dr. Winston Royce first developed the waterfall methodology in 1970 in a paper entitled “Managing the Development of Large Software Systems“. In his paper he first introduces the waterfall approach and then states that it is ”...risky and invites failure“. Royce then proceeded to propose an iterative model as an improvement on his initial waterfall suggestions. Ironically, despite Royce’s own criticisms of a waterfall approach, the industry chose to adopt waterfall, and ignore his superior iterative methodology. You can read more details here.