Of course there's a range of transitional states between waterfall and [whatever miracle cure is in vogue today]. Like all historical revisionists, today's tec

Of course there's a range of transitional states between waterfall and [whatever miracle cure is in vogue today]. Like all historical revisionists, today's techies like to impugn the old and laud the new. ('How could they have been so clueless?') Fact is, long-lived products, esp. from BigCorps, and esp. those in heavily regulated spaces like medicine and transportation always have and always will spend a lot more time and effort on design and process than will ephemeral products and services from startups. My software career started ca. 1990 just as waterfall was evolving into the 'Spiral' iterative software model, which since has been rebadged and remorphed several times into today's 'agile' and 'test-driven' gift from god. However in the real world, makers of every S/W product inevitably must adapt their actual development process to suit the lifecycle needs of their product and customer, in ways that scrum can't serve. Often the best way to reduce technical debt is to increase investment design and testing. And taken to NASA-like limits of fault-tolerance and reliability, that can take you all the way back to waterfall.