[virken]

i'm a private pilot and a software product manager - and i similarly don't know for sure - but think your conjecture is completely plausible - agile is fine and does have cost/productivity advantages - but i rather doubt you'll see the textbook version of it implemented by NASA - but everyone in commercial software is falling all over themselves to reduce software development costs and Agile is supposed to be the holy grail - I've seen it work just fine for line of business software - but I similarly share the concern that manufacturers of airplanes, medical electronics, power infrastructure are adopting it for cost-savings purposes and are not sufficiently concerned about the edge cases where it goes bad with devastating consequences - but that is the hallmark of capitalism - shareholders come first...

[chungleong]

An iterative process makes it impossible to hold the line on safety, I think. In each cycle it'd get compromised a bit, given how both the producer's and the client's overriding concern is cost. Waterfall is the natural model for software that deals with regulated activities but the word has somehow become an epithet.