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yet another Microsoft blogger

# Saturday, February 04, 2006

Waterfall humor

And not the physical kind of Waterfall, the kind that is predominantly used for software development.

The Microsoft Product Lifecycle (last time I checked) was basically Waterfall, where you plan -> spec -> dev -> test. This is how Office is developed (Windows and Mac) and has worked well for at least a decade. However, we’ve found that Waterfall is no good for developing services and fast iteration of your product. That’s where interest in Agile development methods like Scrum have come into play.

As I’ve mentioned before, we kicked Waterfall to the curb last year and haven’t looked back. Waterfall 2006 looks like a great fake conference :-). Some of the papers/links are hilarious (well if you develop software for a living).

 

Saturday, February 04, 2006 7:39:05 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
I don't think it's worked well for Office and Windows...actually, it kind of seems like a disaster. I don't know the exact size of the teams, but I do know that Office has changed very little in ways that matter to me over the years.

The instability of Vista at the current time is a really bad sign...most products should not be allowed to drop that far in quality and then be asked to bounce back. Even if it's not planned to release for a while, like Vista was for years. It takes a tremendous and multiplicative/exponential amount of effort to fix bugs farther away from the creation point.

Some companies, like MS, can get away with it due to the business model supporting the manpower it requires to recover from a waterfall cycle. I'd strongly suspect it's non-optimal, however.
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