Comment by mpyne

Yeah and that's helpful too, because we typically talk about caricatures about both agile and waterfall and I think people truly don't realize that waterfall isn't simply "think about what you do before you do it" and nor is agile "code first; think later".

If people truly understood what waterfall is and how it's supposed to be carried out, they'd be less apt to recommend it. Nothing prevents a team from employing planning in an agile effort, but doing this doesn't turn it into a waterfall project and you shouldn't describe it as such.

If anything, teams that refuse to use agile (thinking it inherently means meetings, story points and not looking beyond 14 days) often send up choosing something even simpler, like cooking up a simple design doc of 4-6 pages before implementing it.

But that's still not waterfall, it's just another of the infinite renditions of agile methods that are out there, just without the consultancies issuing formal training certs.