I’m involved scientific programming tasks (climate models) and we are largely using a mix of prototyping, feature-driven, and big bang models. It’s a result of the requirements for our work. Important is, that our “user base” is extremely small and in the beginning of a project mostly ourselves. The required features are given by the scientific questions and timelines dictated by project timelines from soft funding. Iterations are thus mostly more like “that didn’t quite work, I need another method” kind of arguments. Hence, the implementation of modular and fast evolving design is important and often we try to build our software such that fast development can be done on individual models.
Sometimes theres an idea on how to solve a problem more efficiently or with better performance. And then it’s all about coming up with any proof of concept.

Finally, there is not really anything like a management in our line of work. The professor is usually satisfied if the results work out and papers go out quickly. The rest ist largely up to the group of devs.

For some reason I don’t find it very bizarre. I’d even speculate that a random human mind isn’t any less weird. Surly, the pathways of my thoughts are often very bizarre. 😅