Royce's paper is one of the best pieces on how to manage software projects that I've ever read. It's quite short, but every time I re-read it I notice a new insight I hadn't noticed previously.
Royce did not present that waterfall diagram as a straw man. The structure of the paper is itself rather agile: he starts with the simplest thing that could possibly work, identifies problems with it, and then progressively iterates on it.
That certain people in the Agile community continue to perpetuate the myth that this model is a serious thing that people actually thought was a good idea might be a straw man. But ignoring the rest of the paper is probably good strategy. That one page is a useful starting model for them, too. But they really woudln't want to call attention to any other page of the paper. The rest of the pages are too full of hard-won observations that speak to why Scrum seems to work out so poorly in practice for large, multi-team projects.
Royce did not present that waterfall diagram as a straw man. The structure of the paper is itself rather agile: he starts with the simplest thing that could possibly work, identifies problems with it, and then progressively iterates on it.
That certain people in the Agile community continue to perpetuate the myth that this model is a serious thing that people actually thought was a good idea might be a straw man. But ignoring the rest of the paper is probably good strategy. That one page is a useful starting model for them, too. But they really woudln't want to call attention to any other page of the paper. The rest of the pages are too full of hard-won observations that speak to why Scrum seems to work out so poorly in practice for large, multi-team projects.