Waterfall in schools

April 23, 2006 by Artem

Grig Gheorghiu tells about the funny experience of interviewing the graduates for a QA position. All of the candidates have been taught only a waterfall method.

He said they spent a lot of time writing design documents, and since they *only* had one semester for the whole project, they almost didn't get to code at all. I couldn't help laughing at that point, and I told him that maybe that should have been a red flag concerning the validity of the Waterfall methodology.

My university experience

Some 5-7 years ago I've been also taught a very concrete and Waterfall-like discipline of building the enterprise scale information systems (IS). It was not too bad, because some types of IS do have similarities and in this case rigorously applied waterfall is able to deliver more or less predictable products. What was bad was no notion about the existence of another approaches. Just as Grig tells we've been taught just a "Software Development Lifecycle". Nobody told us that there are different ways and views on constructing the system.

What did you study about the software development? Did your teachers told you about the variety of approaches?

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