Hi, Sorry, some silly questions are coming up... but... Do you think your view on Agile is due to experience you have with waterfall or maybe is it due to your current working environment?
Personally, I did like waterfall a lot. Good analysis work (from both business and IT side) was put into the project, requirements were collected - as an IT BA I even added ideas/ postponed requirements that were excluded from the first phase of the project so the developers could take that into account when planning how to structure the code, etc. If anything changed a ChangeRequest was raised but that it was minimal / non existent. BAs were present from project kick off until the end of the baby sitting period - or even further.
When I joined a company where the management loved to say that "we are working agile" I just felt like a newcomer who doesn't fit in. BAs do not exist, the POs (yes, we have more) want the Business departments to define the solution then the PO only adds some technical details for our system and UI designs/ wireframes, system analyst break this document into taks in JIRA. If you ask the system analysts they rarely know why something was required in a certain way. When you ask the POs, some of them has no idea why things were required from the Business... Basically, they are just splitting some documents into JIRA tasks and 2 weeks sprints and then say they are working in agile.
I tried to figure out if the management wants the company to be Agile just because it's fashionable nowadays or because they want faster delivery. Probably both. :D But then I wonder... To me it feels like by working the way they do currently I think the eliminated the value that BAs brought to the table in Waterfall and don't focus on the requirements anymore. The business writes "solution suggestions" and then noone really challanges them or tries to understand the reason/ aim behind the changes. Then the developers do what they were told and during the demo the Business realises this is not exactly what they wanted. (Sure, I understand this is a problem with my company and my example should not be taken as a "normal way of working".)
All in all, based on what I experienced I think waterfall on requirement definition could work and then we could split things for delivery cycles in a way that fits the needs of the team.