Archive for the ‘Waterfall Problems’ Category.
5th May 2008, 08:02 am
[This is part of my series on the Communication Problems with Waterfall]
A common flaw of many develpment documents: You can’t test them.
It is a glaring flaw of the typical document generated in software development that there is no way to know if it is correct or complete. We can do our work diligently and honestly and still end up with a lot of mistakes, missing pieces, extra (unneeded) pieces, and misunderstandings.
It would be nice to be able to “click a button” and prove that we have collected all the requirements, and that they are exactly what the customer needs and/or wants, or even that it is what the customer THINKS they need or want. We can’t test an ER Diagram to prove that it will result in a database that stores everything we need and nothing more than we need, and allows us to create, retrieve, and use data with all the qualities we expect. We can’t test object models and sequence diagrams (as far as I know, anyway) to prove our design is useful or good. Well… you get the idea. Continue reading ‘You Can’t Test Documents for Correctness or Completeness’ »
16th April 2008, 06:39 am
One set of problems I have often seen with “the Waterfall” are the Communications Problems, particularly the over-reliance on communication by documents.
Communication-By-Documentation (CBD) - What’s so bad about that?
It seems so correct and natural to use documents to capture and communicate all the details of what we are working on that it is almost unthinkable to question this practice. But I am going to try.
The sort of documentation I am discussing here are requirement docs, graphs, ER diagrams, models of all sorts, analysis docs, architectural diagrams, and etc. (There is a lot of etc., by the way. ) I am not saying that documentation is not needed, or that it is not useful, it is just that we have to be careful to protect our project from the problems that these documents bring with them. Continue reading ‘Communication Problems with the Waterfall’ »
16th November 2007, 09:44 am
Many of us have worked with a defined process such as “The Waterfall”, and it seems like it should work - but there are numerous shortcomings that can be attributed to following this developemnt approach and that’s what I’ll explore. Continue reading ‘Waterfall - The Evil Empire’ »
