"The waterfall development model originates in the manufacturing and construction industries; highly structured physical environments in which after-the-fact changes are prohibitively costly, if not impossible. Since no formal software development methodologies existed at the time, this hardware-oriented model was simply adapted for software development."
> It sounds like there must be a general field of project management out there
Yes, project management is a discipline in itself. Why the article is calling its project management framework for software development "software engineering" is not clear. Probably because it sounds more promising; it promises to be the silver bullet:
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model:
"The waterfall development model originates in the manufacturing and construction industries; highly structured physical environments in which after-the-fact changes are prohibitively costly, if not impossible. Since no formal software development methodologies existed at the time, this hardware-oriented model was simply adapted for software development."
> It sounds like there must be a general field of project management out there
Yes, project management is a discipline in itself. Why the article is calling its project management framework for software development "software engineering" is not clear. Probably because it sounds more promising; it promises to be the silver bullet:
http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf