I'd say spiral and agile are similar. However, lately agile has often seemingly become a propaganda system to excuse cowboy coding. I.e.
- Extremely minimal requirements
- Minimal technical analysis
- Minimal documentation
- No code comments
- Special Bonus-- misuse of Domain Driven Design to over-complicate the object model
This was never the idea with spiral. I would argue that it's not really the point of Agile either, although you'd be surprised how many times I've seen this recently. More and more experienced developers/PMs are beginning to see the wisdom of a more balanced approach between waterfall and "agile" -- perhaps this simply brings us back to spiral.
Although there are some useful ideas in the Agile mind-space, it often seems as though it manifested from people who were in organizations that had particularly over-burdensome/unhelpful software design methodologies, and was a reaction/over-reaction to that.
