nobody has ever done "waterfall", it's a strawman created to explain why traditional project management doesn't work in software development. The fact that the article starts with "in the good old days of waterfall" takes away every expectation that I'll read anything intelligent in the article, I believe this post doesn't deserve your time and definitely doesn't deserve mine.
Early in my career (mid-90s) I worked for a defense contractor working on avionics for the F-22 and for GE working on a real-time automation OS. Both used waterfall exclusively. The defense contractor had a multi-year plan with monthly deadlines that could not be missed and the same was true for GE but the deadlines were more delivery based. At GE there were 400 engineers working on the overall project and we had a 40 foot long wall where the GANTT chart for the project, generated by MS Project, was taped to the wall - it was about 4 feet high.
I’m not sure why the above comment is being downvoted:
I was reading The Practice of Cloud System Administration: Designing and Operating Large Distributed Systems, and I came across this quote:
Royce’s 1970 paper, which is credited with “inventing” the model, actually identifies it so Royce can criticize it and suggest improvements. He wrote it is “risky and invites failure” because “design iterations are never confined to the successive step.” What Royce suggests as an alternative is similar to what we now call Agile. Sadly, multiple generations of software developers have had to suffer through waterfall projects thanks to people who, we can only assume, didn’t read the entire paper (Pfeiffer 2012) [p. 175].
