The longer I work in this industry, the more I am coming to believe that waterfall is nothing more than a strawman set up to make development process X look like the Holy Grail.
Has anyone seen it in real life - in the pure form?
I once worked at a place that "did waterfall", but a diagram of the process would have shown arrows in all directions (would we call these things salmon runs or something?) and if you needed to go backwards only that specific piece did so while everything else continued as normal. Unit testing, integration testing, system testing, etc was all present on day 1.
Has anyone seen it in real life - in the pure form?
I once worked at a place that "did waterfall", but a diagram of the process would have shown arrows in all directions (would we call these things salmon runs or something?) and if you needed to go backwards only that specific piece did so while everything else continued as normal. Unit testing, integration testing, system testing, etc was all present on day 1.