Maybe! I stopped working for consulting companies early in my career, and that was the last time I saw anything resembling waterfall. After that I worked in product or service companies, and none did detailed requirements/planning prior to implementation, they mostly winged it (calling it "agile", but we know better). Maybe I'm biased.

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NikolaNovak 3 days ago | parent [-]

Beyond consulting companies, there's also just so much back office / line of business software out there - procurement, human resources, payroll, enterprise performance management, etc. Most of it at high level is slow and onerous because it needs to be reliable and predictable. It cannot fail fast and stakeholders place premium on the feeling of certainty / forecasting.

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the_af 2 days ago | parent [-]

I understand that, but didn't agile arise because that feeling of certainty/forecasting proved false? That is, experience showed that the end result ran over budget, underdelivered or simply wasn't needed anymore by the time it was done?

It's not that Agile is chaotic because it's cool, it simply (allegedly) surfaces the chaos and uncertainty that was already there. And in my limited experience in consulting, I did build one of these heavily specified LOB software that got canceled near finishing, with all of us laid off and all the effort wasted. This was some CRUD system for an insurance company, by the way; "boring" software by definition.

(To be clear: I'm not arguing Agile truly fixed this, just that what was before had serious enough problems to spark a paradigm change).

	▲	NikolaNovak 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Oh, I agree, and we can probably sit for 3 hours over a drink (Orange Juice, preferably:) sharing sea stories of executives embracing illusion of predictability and its ultimate fallacy :). But that desire / delusion did not go away. I don't even need to go into politics to showcase that human kind, sadly, on average does not necessarily learn from past experiences and mistakes.