History
The "waterfall model", documented in 1970 by Royce was the first publicly documented life cycle model. The model was developed to help cope with the increasing complexity of aerospace products. The waterfall model followed a documentation driven paradigm.
This is the most common and classic of life cycle models, also referred to as a linear-sequential life cycle model. It is very simple to understand and use. In a waterfall model, each phase must be completed in its entirety before the next phase can begin. At the end of each phase, a review takes place to determine if the project is on the right path and whether or not to continue or discard the project. Unlike what I mentioned in the general model, phases do not overlap in a waterfall model.
Here these following phases are followed in order:
1. Requirements specification
2. Design
3. Construction (AKA implementation or coding)
4. Integration
5. Testing and debugging (AKA Validation)
6. Installation
7. Maintenance
Advantages
* Simple and easy to use.
* Easy to manage due to the rigidity of the model – each phase has specific deliverables and a review process.
* Phases are processed and completed one at a time.
* Works well for smaller projects where requirements are very well understood.
Disadvantages
The waterfall model however is argued by many to be a bad idea in practice, mainly because of their belief that it is impossible to get one phase of a software product's lifecycle "perfected" before moving on to the next phases and learning from them (or, at least, the belief that this is impossible for any non-trivial program). For example, clients may not be aware of exactly what requirements they want before they see a working prototype and can comment upon it; they may change their requirements constantly, and program designers and implementers may have little control over this. If clients change their requirements after a design is finished, that design must be modified to accommodate the new requirements, invalidating quite a good deal of effort if overly large amounts of time have been invested into "Big Design Up Front". (Thus, methods opposed to the naive waterfall model--such as those used in Agile software development--advocate less reliance on a fixed, static requirements document or design document). Designers may not (or, more likely, cannot) be aware of future implementation difficulties when writing a design for an unimplemented software product. That is, it may become clear in the implementation phase that a particular area of program functionality is extraordinarily difficult to implement. If this is the case, it is better to revise the design than to persist in using a design that was made based on faulty predictions and that does not account for the newly discovered problem areas.
* Adjusting scope during the life cycle can kill a project
* No working software is produced until late during the life cycle.
* High amounts of risk and uncertainty.
* Poor model for complex and object-oriented projects.
* Poor model for long and ongoing projects.
* Poor model where requirements are at a moderate to high risk of changing.
