It is popular in some agile circle to use Waterfall as the stalking horse for every bad management practices in software development. A recent example is
Go/No Go decisions are a residue of waterfall thinking. All software can built incrementally and most released incrementally.
Nothing in Waterfall prohibits incremental release. In fact the notion of block release is the basis of most Software Intensive Systems development. From the point of view of the business capabilities are what they bought. The capability to do something of value in exchange for the cost of that value. Here's an example in health insurance business. Incremental release of features is of little value if those features don't work together to provide some needed capability to conduct business. A naive approach is the release early and release often platitude of some in the agile domain. Let's say we're building a personnel management system. This includes recruiting, on-boarding, provisioning, benefits signup, time keeping, and payroll. It's not be very useful to release the time keeping feature if the payroll feature was not ready.
So before buying into the platitude of release early and often ask what does the business need to do business? Then draw a picture like the one about, develop a Plan for producing those capabilities in the order they are needed to deliver the needed value. Without this approach, you'll be spending money without producing value and calling that agile.
That way you can stop managing other peoples money with Platitudes and replace them with actual business management processes. So every time you hear a platitude masking as good management, ask does that person using that platitude work anywhere that is high value at risk? No, then probably has yet to encounter that actual management of other peoples money
