WUP: Waterfall Unified Process

Jon Kern

Jon Kern

The crux of the WUP methodology lies in being able to get into the "Waterfall Think Funk" or WTF for short. Not at all like "Object Think," WTF is much easier to grasp and to realize in full. While snobby people with beards and pipes wax philosophical about Objects, Inheritance, Encapsulation, Unix, penguins, and what not, the WTF philosophy permits only one single program unit (well, sometimes two if there is a user interface like a printer). In the WTF world, stuff just runs downhill. It is so easy you can think of it like falling off of a cliff — once you do it, you never forget.

As a little preview of the session, what the funk, let's try a little WTF mind exercises...

First off, picture being at this session lying on your yoga mat, shoes and socks off, underarmour on, next to the BA and DBA and word template curator. I have the patchoulli and sandalwood incense burning already. The lights dim and the slow music starts. It's a duet with Celine Dion and Barry Manilow (and occasionally ABBA) — your favorite mix of late 70's soft crock and Gregorian chants (with Julian conversions).

Now, imagine you are a waterfall droplet. You look over your shoulder, what do you see?
An upstream droplet.

Good. You are getting it! Now, get back into that place where you are that droplet again.

Look forward and tell me... what do you see?
Another droplet?

Excellent! We will go into more detail in our session and you should be able to earn enough credits to gain a CMMj Level 6 (Crazily Mangled Modeling judo) certificate and the free bar of hotel soap that comes with the certificate.

Unlike Uncle Bob's festering vision of the Bridge Over River Kwai (and I hope that dam whistling song sticks in his head for the next month while he eats sushi from the river kwai), WTF eschews the whole art and science of bridge design. If it is worth building, it doesn't necessarily follow that it is worth designing, and as my tabacky-chewin' gran pappy Don once tol' me:

"It sure as shootin' ain't never worth no consideratin' of nundatdare metadata levels of meta        <cough>         data. <pitoooui><ding>"

Come and learn from Jon Kern (pronounced "Cockburn") how with the Big WUP:

The beauty of WUP is to use WTF artifacts lashed together as a giant raft. The best part of this session is:

And, for you refuctoring experts, learn the WTFN^2 (WTF Not Now!) process from the outside in. The beauty about WUP is that you can do refuctoring of all the design documents to help people get to the WTF ("where am I?") place sooner rather than later — or worse, never. Along the way, you will learn one of my favorite refucterationinged techniques: replace known words in the dictionary with obscure terms and antonyms (and every third one with a synonym for the preceding word), then do random and incomplete global find and replaces in only some of the documents. Remember, strong coupling between design documents is a bad thing. And, the only cohesion we want is in the hot glue used to bind the 400 page data dictionary sorted on the 3rd letter in each word.

Since there is one iteration in the WUP method, you can refactor as much as you like in the second iteration without affecting anything — the program still won't run. You don't even have to be dogmatic, it is doubtful that you will ever finish producing all of the documentation. By the time you get close, more templates will have been released by the Template Management Group.

WUP takes the Q out of QA and collapses the eternity that it seems to take everyone else to get to production down to zero (0, nil, null, zip, nada, zilch). Yup — you don't need testing at the end (or at the beginning or in the middle) because there are never any defects with folks applying the Big WUP, WTF methodology. You can take this one to the bank!

In less than 37.5 hours, you will learn this and much, much less.

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