Use of the dreaded Waterfall model is a stalking horse for agilest and #Noestimates advocates for the evils of software development guided by any Governance processes intending to be the steward of other people's money. If it's your own money spend it as you wish, no one cares. If it's not your money, you're likely to need to explain to those who gave you the money what you intend to do with it, when you intend to stop spending their money and deliver something of value in return, and what features you hope to provide for that money and what your confidence is in each of those measures.
It is obvious the evil rigid waterfall model isn't incremental. It was never supposed to be and was never advocated to be. It seems to me that all software development models, spiral on (starting in 1984), have been iterative whenever possible.
It is obvious waterfall model is still used - improperly used by the way, since Royce debunked that approach in 1975. Models beyond wrongly used Waterfall are designed to be incremental/iterative, while the Waterfall model (again debunked by Royce) are not designed that way.
The iterative and incremental software development processes started in the domain I work (embedded software-intensive system of systems), beginning with STS 1.
An implementation approach was devised for STS-1, which met the objectives by applying the ideal cycle (they mean the waterfall cycle), to small elements of the overall software package on an iterative basis. ... STS-1 had 17 interim release drops in a 31-month period starting October 1977. Full software capability was provided after the 9th release in December 1978. - in "Design, Development, Integration: Space Shuttle Primary Flight Software System, Willaim A. Madden and Kyle Y. Rone, Communications of the ACM, September 1984, Vol. 27, No. 9.
