On waterfall vs agile, both don't work without significant flexibility and fuzzying the game on the dev team's part. Waterfall as it was done in early 2000s wa

On waterfall vs agile, both don't work without significant flexibility and fuzzying the game on the dev team's part. Waterfall as it was done in early 2000s was mostly a high level plan and smaller unofficial iterations on the ground. We knew we need to test, and sometimes partially release stuff in advance to have an idea of what's actually working and what's half baked. The same way successful agile projects are almost always done with unofficial rough planning and dependency graphing checked ahead, and smaller iterarion following the big picture from there. On both methodologies, religiously adhering to the mantra is suicidal, and I don't see agile being significantly better except if all you care about it getting paid iteratively -- which is a noble goal for a consultant. Perhaps the point that bears reiterating is very few shops actually followed hard line waterfall planning (nor agile, for that matter).