Developing Programmers .com

I wasn’t well enough this week to produce my weekly full article (I was even sick enough that I stayed home from my day job!) but a kind soul has made sure the perfect link crossed my desk today.

Remember the “Waterfall model” of software development? For those who (wisely) slept through that lecture at university, the waterfall model is where each step is done before moving on to the next. You design everything. Then you write everything. Then you test everything. If there’s a problem? Well waterfalls are only good at going downhill but my lecturer did admit there had to be loops in there somewhere. Basically this is the “naive” approach to software development that some managers really do push for if they haven’t had much experience with the iterative process that is creating an application.

“The Waterfall Alliance” have produced a wonderful web site, advertising the Waterfall 2006 conference, with wonderful tutorials like “Pair Managing: Two Managers per Programmer” by Jim Highsmith. Take a look at their site, it’s full of ideas that probably achieve something… Not programming, but something.

Booking for Waterfall ‘06 might be a little tricky, their site says:

We’re sorry but registration is not yet ready. Our software developers have a really wonderful design. They’re almost done entering it into it a UML tool. They’ve told us not to worry and that finishing it will be “trivial” because “all that’s left is the coding.”