Agile development practices

The use of agile methodologies has revolutionized the information technology industry. But what is Agile, and what are the differences compared to traditional software development models? In this article, I will answer these questions by comparing the Waterfall approach to Agile.

Waterfall was presented in 1956 by Herbert D. Benington at the Symposium on Advanced Programming Methods for Digital Computers. This approach expects a linear progression of the following phases:

This model’s sequential nature forces a development team to move to the next phase of development or testing only if the previous step is reviewed and verified.

Easy to manage and control: Using the Waterfall model, each phase has specific deliverables and is processed one at a time without overlapping. This linearity and clarity of all the steps results in a model easy to understand and use.

Early end-goal determination: Because the requirements and end-goal are defined initially, it’s possible to calculate the deadlines and even the release date in advance based on the duration of each phase. This clarity also makes it more difficult for the team to get lost as development proceeds.

Requirements might change over time: Waterfall relates to the customer requirements. Development takes time, and even if the requirements are precisely defined at the beginning of a project, the outcome might no longer reflect the needs of the customer.

Customers often don’t know what they want: If you work in PM, you know how challenging it can be to gather customer requirements in the first place, and even if you built exactly what the customer asked for, the end result often differs from what they actually need. Customers often don’t know what they want until they see it or cannot articulate what they need.

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