Agile in Software Projects: Where Does it Fit? Where Doesn’t it? What about Hybrid Models?

  Agile   New Practitioners   Work Breakdown Structures (WBS)   Knowledge Shelf  

Why agile?

The  word “agile” can also be thought of as a team being agile, not about any specific processes or principles. I would rather call agile a model, not a methodology, because we can plan/describe the agile model in whichever way we or our organizations wants. As such, we are not doing anything different in agile than in the waterfall model but it is just the way the various stages are adjusted in a disciplined manner that make this a moving process or methodology (see Figure 1 for the most basic representations of the agile and waterfall models).

Figure 1: Basic waterfall and agile models

One of the most important driving factors for moving into the agile way of developing projects is that the customer  wants to see a small working model at the earliest stage. The product owner/customer is willing to discuss and explain the actual behavior of the product in person to a group of people who will actually be developing it and also show the built product back to the customer. This will provide more control to the product owner/customer as well because he or she will be part of the actual product discussion and not just writing the documentation. This could be a perfect fit for an “agile” way of development, because we can build a team of professionals who own the product development and are also working face-to-…

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.