ITNow: XP, Agile or set in stone?

I've just received the latest edition of the British Computer Society's Journal ITNow (formerly called The Computer Bulletin). I confess that I rarely read it, but this month had an article on XP which caught my attention, so I thought I'd take a look. Unfortunately it was a bit of a disappointment, as was another article under the category "the future of computing".

To XP or not to XP?
The article on XP (eXtreme Programming) is primarily a disappointment because it is supposed to present two opposing views, but the first view is a fairly loosely written advocation of the use of CM (Configuration Management) with Agile methods, whilst the counterpoint view is a very robust criticism of XP (far too robust in my opinion). To someone unfamiliar with this area it would be easily to miss the fact that XP is only one Agile method and it would be a surprise to then discover that the author of the counterpoint—Matt Stephens—is actually an agile practitioner who's views may well coincide with the author of the first view.

I then turned over a few pages to find an article entitled…

A new approach to business computing

I'm sure I'm probably missing something here, but this article seemed like something that might have been better entitled "An historical look at computing". It seems to present a long explanation of how networked computing and increased computing power enable fully automated real-time processes. It then goes on to suggest a single iteration waterfall approach to software development, e.g. to quote: "design, engineering spec., build, operate". Somewhere down the line he seems to have completely failed to recognise the existence of "change" and the fundamental fact that "design, build, test, crash, fix, test, crash…" is actually a very suitable model for software development (where a crash is a very fast and low risk operation) compared with airplane design where a crash is a massive cost in time and money.