The incumbent thesis was that if you wanted to manage something professionally, you structured it like a waterfall—or at least like a cartoon version of a waterfall, with several pools, each flowing into the next. There were separate, sequential stages each project had to go through: gathering requirements, design, implementation, verification, and maintenance. Different teams were generally responsible for each of the stages, and once a given stage was complete you didn’t go back. Once the requirements had been set, for instance, it was critical that the design and implementation faithfully
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