If Waterfall is "Look before you leap" what is Agile?

Fantastic Sergio very well said. I've read somewhere recently that you don't "do" Agile - you "are" Agile. Thank you for reminding me of that.

If the Product Owner is doing his/her job, Agile (speaking in the abstract) can be look before you leap. It also depends on the type of project. If it's more about exploration than delivering a specific product, there will be some crawling involved, but if you have an experienced Agile team, you're not testing your resources and capabilities.

There are definitely people that over-hype Agile. It has been getting better, but there are also companies whose existence is based on Agile and individuals whose livelihood is agile consulting and books, so there is going to be some hype.

Agile is about creating a working product .
I definitely see it's value in software development.
You save time by not gathering all the requirements upfront and only plan what you need . The keyword here is "Plan" .
If Agile is run properly , The product will still undertake good development practices, including pair programming and testing before being released. You still need to implement quality and customer satisfaction and stick to the scope of the sprint.

The need to do agile , springs from requiring a quicker time to market, and/or a Minimum Viable Product.
It gives opportunity to the customer to try out the product to see what it can do for them and then based on the usage, suggest improvements which then may form part of the next Sprint.
Agile is also useful where the Business is a startup and would like to develop it's business process around the Product.
Waterfall can absolutely be implemented in iterations as well . You can use the 5 PMBOK process groups in a Feasibility study or a Pilot before choosing to do a big bang implementation.

Agile is definitely not intended to be the absence of documentation or approvals. The scope needs to be verified by the customer at the end of each sprint and the acceptance of the product has to be formally recorded.
There absolutely have to be PMP, scope , cost and schedule plans , base lined during sprint planning and approved by the customer before execution. It doesnt matter if these are one page documents. They have to exist !

Building on Denise's definition, I'd say Agile is looking while leaping a short, achievable distance - like leaping from stone to stone across a creek when we were kids. We'd hop to one stone, then calculate how we'd leap to the next stone. We'd did this because each stone differed in size, shape and slipperiness, and we'd apply the lessons learned from our previous jumps to our upcoming jumps.

Agile is looking and leaping at the same time.

I see agile is look at the next step before you leap but also have a view as to the overall staircase to make sure it is the right floor you are aiming for and the next step is a good place to get to.

Maybe just not leaping as far - hopscotch?

Joking aside, agreed. Planning, no matter the approach, is paramount.

Interesting thoughts, and I agree that Agile seems a bit over-hyped and Waterfall is over-criticized at present. I think both methodologies are sound and the application is dependent on the project/product situation. Following your post to see what others are thinking as well, thank you!

I've done several projects where we "waterscrummed"; defined monthly release sprints but within the sprint used development/integration testing/user acceptance testing within the sprint. We staggered the sprints where dev was sprint+1 while integration/user testing was working on sprint+0, so when dev was complete testing could occur then dev went on to the next sprint. While not purist agile or waterfall, it worked because it gave us monthly capability releases. At the end of the day, we're measured by what we delivered to the business and how fast; not how much we adhered to a methodology. Happy to talk about this more if helpful.