Criticizing the Waterfall Model

Question

Criticize in brief the Waterfall Model?

Answer 1

The waterfall model is disagreed by many to be a bad idea in practice. This is mostly because of their belief that it is not possible for any non-trivial project to get one phase of a software product's life-cycle perfected, before moving on to next phases and learning from them.

For instance, clients might not be aware of precisely what requirements they need before reviewing the working prototype and commenting on it; they might change their needs constantly. Designers and programmers might have little control over this. If clients change their needs after the design is finalized, the design should be modified to accommodate the new needs. This efficiently means invalidating a good deal of working hours, that means increased cost, particularly if a big amount of the project's resources has already been invested in the Big Design Up Front.