[dragonwriter]

> The reason the waterfall method received so much bad press is because of requirements gathering, not the software or data design phases.

No, it was because all three were done wrong.

Requirements gathering is the biggest problem, true. But even if requirements were both knowable and fixed, for most projects, big up front requirements gathering, design, and then implementation would have lots of waste in the lean sense of effort expended that spends time not delivering customer value.

Now, that gets made worse with the rework created by the fact that requirements gathering without validation by use gets lots of stuff wrong and that the context is often evolving such that requirements will drift between gathering, design, and implementation in a waterfall project, so that lots of work is done which never delivers value and needs reworked before it can do so, but the problem exists even without that exacerbation.