[DougWebb]

Software is hard, people are hard, so the idea should be to have as little process as possible. Most of it exists as arse-covering material anyway.

This depends on the environment. Working for a consulting company, where time spent on the project is billed to a customer and the project has a fixed budget, Process is needed to make sure the project is estimated and executed properly, and the arse-covering helps to guarantee that you get paid when the customer makes changes mid-way through that increase the project costs.

It would be fantastic to work on projects with open-ended budgets and collaboration with customers to figure out what the software should be as it's being developed, but in the real world I don't think that is often possible. It's not just consultant/client relationships; even in big companies where IT is given a budget from upper management you have the same situation. Management won't approve a budget without a detailed description of the deliverable, and IT can't exceed the budget or deliver something other than what was promised.

Waterfall, for all of its drawbacks, handles this situation well. The problem is that no one wants to pay for all of the paperwork and management overhead it requires to function properly.