Which, given that that's a military spec, also speaks to a motivation for such a tightly controlled approach: the cost of design changes is truly immense. When you have a large government project with MANY different contractors working on different pieces of the system, a lot of Agile principles need to go out the window. The spec needs to be fairly well nailed down up front because a late change that affects adjacent systems gets really expensive when those adjacent systems are being managed by a completely different company. That requirements tweak may now be a full on contract renegotiation. And, as Boeing's recent woes illustrate, communication among all the subcontractors may be so poor that even identifying the potential impact of a specification change may be difficult to do reliably.
Not such a big deal in a lot of tech projects where it's relatively inexpensive to solve problems as you find them. But Mars rovers don't get to have canary deployments.
Also, even then, it's still not really "textbook" waterfall.
Which, given that that's a military spec, also speaks to a motivation for such a tightly controlled approach: the cost of design changes is truly immense. When you have a large government project with MANY different contractors working on different pieces of the system, a lot of Agile principles need to go out the window. The spec needs to be fairly well nailed down up front because a late change that affects adjacent systems gets really expensive when those adjacent systems are being managed by a completely different company. That requirements tweak may now be a full on contract renegotiation. And, as Boeing's recent woes illustrate, communication among all the subcontractors may be so poor that even identifying the potential impact of a specification change may be difficult to do reliably.
Not such a big deal in a lot of tech projects where it's relatively inexpensive to solve problems as you find them. But Mars rovers don't get to have canary deployments.
Also, even then, it's still not really "textbook" waterfall.