According to statistics, the success rate of its projects is about 30%. Why? Companies cannot identify their potential customers’ needs and measure project success. That’s why choosing the right methodology matters. In this Blog, we’ll compare Agile versus Waterfall and give our view on when each of them needs to be used.
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What is Agile?
Agile is a type of project development organization that focuses on recognizing changes and iterative development. The main principles and values of Agile include:
- Interaction and individuals are more important than tools and processes.
- Working software is more important than documentation.
- Customer collaboration is more important than contract negotiation.
- A timely response to changes is more important than sticking to a plan.
Don’t you think that flexibility to change the concept is much more important than strict planning?
Benefits:
- Improved quality
- Stakeholder engagement
- Predictable schedules and costs. The development process consists of so-called sprints. Therefore, the development process includes fixed schedules and can better understand how much each feature will cost.
- Predictable delivery.
Challenges:
- Lack of skilled product owners
- Teams resisting changes
- Lack of cross-functional teams that should be able to accomplish all the necessary tasks with no help from the outside.
Let’s now review the Agile development cycle, how we see it at EZtek.
- Project initiation: Here, we usually discuss the project vision with stakeholders and evaluate the ROI.
- Planning: Our business analysts and project managers meet with product owners to define clear objectives and milestones.
- Development
- Production stage where our experts monitor the usage, detect bugs and fix them
- Retirement: At this stage, the product gets pulled from production so that our customers can migrate to a newer version.
To monitor the team’s efficiency, we recommend employing some of the Agile metrics.
Let’s now move on to Waterfall.
What is the Waterfall methodology?
Waterfall is a more traditional, linear approach to project management. In this case, the requirements are collected at the beginning to serve as a basis for a project plan.
Advantages
- Clear structure
- Predictable costs
- Success measurement
- Quick development
- Project goal is determined early.
Disadvantages
- Possible communication issues
- Making changes difficult if customers are not satisfied with the product during the verification stage, you may spend a lot of money starting all over again.
- Lack of flexibility
- Delays testing until after completion which is not the best strategy according to our QA team.
The usual development stages of the Waterfall model are:
- Requirements: gathered at the very beginning of the project
- Design
- Implementation: developers create the actual code based on the specifications formulated at the beginning.
- Verification.
Now customers can review the completed product and determine whether or not it meets their initial requirements. - Maintenance
So what is the difference between Waterfall and Agile?
Waterfall is a sequential linear model where everything happens during a particular phase of the project and the phases follow each other in a strict order.
Agile is a flexible model that involves a continuous development process and testing.
Actually, to choose the right methodology you need to analyze their pros and cons. According to our experience you can use Waterfall if you’re dealing with strict requirements and familiar tasks. Or you may choose Agile if you need more flexibility. You can also combine and merge these two methodologies in different ways if you realize that the pure Agile or pure Waterfall cannot fulfill your needs.
This Blog was prepared by the EZtek team. We provide software development, UI/UX design, QA and testing as well as IT consulting services. Need experts help, contact us now.
