Now I quite often get e-mails at work publicising one conference or another, however today I got something a bit different – details of the Waterfall 2006 Conference. The introduction from the site sets the scene:

After years of being disparaged by some in the software development community, the waterfall process is back with a vengeance. You’ve always known a good waterfall-based process is the right way to develop software projects. Come to the Waterfall 2006 conference and see how a sequential development process can benefit your next project. Learn how slow, deliberate handoffs (with signatures!) between groups can slow the rate of change on any project so that development teams have more time to spend on anticipating user needs through big, upfront design.

Of course a look at the date of the conference is a bit of a giveaway too – April 1st 2006.

The site is actually a pretty good, and fairly extensive joke at the expense of the venerable Waterfall Method for software development. I, like I think many software developers of my generation was told about the Waterfall Method at University almost as a bit of history, the impression being given that this was something that had been superseded. The reality is somewhat different, for example the last big project I worked on, because it was high profile and ‘business critical’ was run using the Waterfall Method and the method is still commonly used within many large organisations. Indeed a read through some of the sessions on the phoney conference certainly prove to be accurate descriptions of the way some parts of most large IT departments seem to operate.

Anyway, if you’re someone who has been stuck struggling through a waterfall project whether as a frustrated customer on the receiving end, or a frustrated IT professional involved in the process, have a read through the conference details.