The author points to Microsoft as a typical example of corporate programming in the 1990s.
Yet Microsoft wasn't using a (pseudo)waterfall development model. Quoting Steve McConnell in "Rapid Development (1996) Page 271:
] In addition to providing explicit support for morale, Microsoft gladly trades other factors to keep morale high, sometimes trading theme in ways that would make other companies shudder (Zachary 1994). I've seen then trade methodological purity, programming discipline, control over the product specification, control over the schedule, management visibility -- almost anything to benefit morale.
As I've pointed out before, I've read about software development projects at Apple, Be, Commodore, Data General, id, Infocom, Microsoft, VisiCorp and others. None were using (pseudo)waterfall.
I therefore agree with bdefore that it seems to have been "far from ubiquitous and mostly limited to government or very large corporations", and that the era of waterfall was a mythical beast.
I guess it depends where you worked. I certainly don't claim it was ubiquitous, but I personally saw it at a start up and a small software house. Also government, for sure!
In the late 90s/early 00s I worked at two large tech companies that at the time were household names. Granted one no longer exists and neither are what that phrase would evoke today.
In neither case did we do waterfall as people describe it. If anything it was even less process than agile. Sure the gantt charts existed, and sure at a high level things had been drawn out. But in the boots on the ground teams things were a lot more ad hoc. The biggest difference I see from that experience today was that individual developers were handed larger pieces that'd take weeks or more, and had a lot more freedom of action.
Not sure I'd call it better or worse to common scrum setups, but likely a bit of both.
I saw it at a local council (serving ~300k people) & a small gas (as in methane delivery) company as well as at a very large telco and in government/defence. It may not have been ubiquitous but it was definitely everywhere I worked.
Yes, "Rapid Development" lists a dozen or more approaches, including iterative prototyping and (modified) waterfall, with pros and cons of each one.
My issue with the standard Agile story repeated here is the lack of any mention of pre-Agile approaches other than waterfall.
Take: "Rather than clearing the way for software developers to build, waterfall gummed up the works with binders of paperwork and endless meetings."
Why is there no mention of any other approach? We can easily point to the Macintosh project, which took 5 years (1979 to 1984). Yet, no waterfall there.
Or, take a closer look at: "Peter Varhol, a technology industry consultant, estimates that in the early 1990s, the average application took three years to develop, from idea to finished product." (That's shorter than the Macintosh project.)
What does that mean? Which industry? What kind of applications? Clearly a lot of "log cabin" PC applications are excluded from that list - just think of all the DB2 and VB applications people wrote in that era. And video games.
Yet Microsoft wasn't using a (pseudo)waterfall development model. Quoting Steve McConnell in "Rapid Development (1996) Page 271:
] In addition to providing explicit support for morale, Microsoft gladly trades other factors to keep morale high, sometimes trading theme in ways that would make other companies shudder (Zachary 1994). I've seen then trade methodological purity, programming discipline, control over the product specification, control over the schedule, management visibility -- almost anything to benefit morale.
As I've pointed out before, I've read about software development projects at Apple, Be, Commodore, Data General, id, Infocom, Microsoft, VisiCorp and others. None were using (pseudo)waterfall.
I therefore agree with bdefore that it seems to have been "far from ubiquitous and mostly limited to government or very large corporations", and that the era of waterfall was a mythical beast.