Talking of ignorance of the history of development practises, I can never believe it when I see people promoting 'waterfall' as if it were somehow a legitimate

Talking of ignorance of the history of development practises, I can never believe it when I see people promoting 'waterfall' as if it were somehow a legitimate practise and hadn't been coined as a pejorative term to describe what was wrong with software development. The fundamentals of agile have been around for a long time and the manifesto was an attempt to formalise what had worked well. And as for these old systems for airlines etc (which took many thousands of man days to produce), I wouldn't be shouting about them as great shining examples. Anybody who has had to integrate with these systems will be aware that they tend to be junk under the hood and they tend to fall apart if you throw internet levels of traffic at them. From this article, I have to wonder when the writer last coded if ever. (I do however agree with the point that the 'agile' industry is a mess and that scrum in particular is often nearer waterfall than agile.)