"waterfall with sprints"!
This question of mine sprang into existence when a senior manager mentioned he is a water fall guy and still sees it good.
Well, we are stuck with people preaching Agile and people following Waterfall.
The Waterfall horror stories as told by Agile/Scrum people are tailored to support their narrative.
That kind of Pure/Classical Waterfall maybe happend at government or public sector projects, not in the tech companies.
What most people mean by "waterfall" is anything with Upfront Design phase. I never encountered pure wtarfall at tech companies, the closest was RUP (Rational Unified Process), but it has overlapping phases and iterations. It's modern iteration are various mini-waterfall SDLCs (e.g. Event Modeling, Shape Up).
The only real problem with the waterfall model is that the original book didn't mention iteration. the author thought that it was too obvious to mention. Obviously once your customers have version one of your product, you are going to collect detailed feedback from them and use that to inform the design of cersion two. He probably didn't envision companies making a prototype in two weeks and making version one available to the whole world a month or two later, but that is not a flaw in the model.
BTW, the original Royce' waterfall paper didn't promoted it, but instead presented it as an anti-pattern. But even it shown feedback loops (i.e. going backward to the previous phases), which are kind of iterations.
