I agree about the hostility to waterfall. Waterfall put men on the moon, so it can't be such a terrible thing. I don't think there is a conflict, personally---t

I agree about the hostility to waterfall. Waterfall put men on the moon, so it can't be such a terrible thing. I don't think there is a conflict, personally---there's no reason that you can't plan sprints in the context of an overall waterfall schedule. In the real world, there are deadlines, and any process, no matter how agile, has to recognize that fact and work within schedule constraints. I think that what agile buys you is the opportunity for near-continuous integration and feedback, so that you know fairly early when you are either going to have to apply more resources, trim functionality, or extend deadlines. Properly applied, agile is better than traditional waterfall at flushing out unknowns and potential architecture issues, because of the focus on working, tested, demonstrable code from the beginning.