TIL: "Winston W. Royce's final model, his intended improvement upon his initial "waterfall model", illustrated that feedback could (should, and often would) lead from code testing to design (as testing of code uncovered flaws in the design) and from design back to requirements specification (as design problems may necessitate the removal of conflicting or otherwise unsatisfiable / undesignable requirements)"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model#Modified_water...

Interesting because that's definitely not what's taught in the handful of Software Engineering books I've read, and steps backward are not canon (rather, they're called something besides Waterfall i.e Spiral or Iterative).

Looking at that page again, it looks like what I describe is called "pure waterfall".

This is a good article on the topic http://www.bawiki.com/wiki/Waterfall.html

That is indeed a Great Writeup!

Instead of getting lost in the comments, You should post it to HN and invite discussions with a title like "Most of what you have heard about the Waterfall Development Model is Wrong!" or "How the Agile folks have misled you about the Waterfall Development Model" :-)

Most books on Software Engineering are mere compendiums with nothing much to recommend them eg. the texts by Sommerville or Pressman. Two exceptions that i know of are those by Ghezzi,Jazayeri,Mandrioli and Pankaj Jalote.