Modern software development methods might seem a world away from the early days of punch-card programming, but it turns out that some things are timeless. Winston Royce was a computer scientist for Lockheed Martin and TRW in the 1960s, working on space mission planning, orbit selection and developing the software on which America’s rapidly expanding space sector relied. As part of this work, he wrote an influential report advocating a standard approach to producing code – particularly for large projects – which split the overall development cycle into seven steps. Each stage fed into the next, like a cascade of waterfalls where each drop lands in a pool that goes on to feed the next fall.
Today, Royce is widely credited with inventing the “waterfall model”, as used in software…
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PC Pro (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 2025