[sageikosa]

Actually the "waterfall" effigy defined in various manifestos was the revolt against civil engineering project managers who entered the software engineering field and believed that "building software" was like building a bridge, a skyscraper, or a sewer system.

The correct solution space wasn't to abandon dependencies and long range planning, but to recognize that software engineering is a specific type of process engineering that involves partially or completely automated processes.

Software doesn't describe the state of a machine in so much as it describes a process. Often developers don't recognize this so much because many of the terms have been concretized into the operating system (ie, process) and get thought of as a container for software instead of the representation of an automated process working in concert on shared resources.

And consequently software is complete when the process is well-defined and repeatable, not when things are bolted together.