Winston W. Royce

Winston W. Royce was an American computer scientist and software-engineering manager whose 1970 paper Managing the Development of Large Software Systems is the paper most often cited as the origin of the waterfall model of software development. Royce's own paper called a single-pass, sequential development process a simpler method and explicitly warned that it is risky and invites failure, arguing instead for iterative feedback loops between adjacent phases and for running major phases twice. Later writers cited his paper in support of the rigid, single-pass process he had actually argued against, an influential misreading discussed as a dissent below.