I think Waterfall has a tendency to be propped up as this mythical approach of the past that no sane person would follow anymore, when the truth is that plenty of so-called Agile shops fall into the same trap that we fall in all the time, which is to bundle too much shit together in such a way that it can’t be shipped as independent pieces. The result being long, annoying development processes where it doesn’t take one to two weeks to ship something. It takes a month or more or what have you.
The answer is neither one or the other. It’s sort of a constant struggle between the two. There’s not a hard delineation either between what is Waterfall and what is Agile. They’ve sort of become these, in some ways, cartoon incarnations of themselves. The truth is it’s a lot more gray.
(via Signal versus Noise)