In what context? Team member, stakeholder, or customer? Which flavor of Agile? How waterfall was intended to work, or what it has become?
Some projects are better suited to one versus the other; not every project can realize the benefits that often get sold as part of agile.
One of the most talked about (and oversold) advantages to agile is that something gets delivered faster than anything would have been delivered following the traditional approach of delivering everything all at once. This can also be a disadvantage, especially if your stakeholders do not have an agile mindset, because what is delivered is not necessarily the final product and you can't always set a hard deadline for delivery of specific features. Instead, it is an MVP - minimum viable product - and work continues to deliver the next piece of the MVP. Eventually, you can get everything you want, but there is no guarantee that it will be faster.
While traditional approaches do incorporate change management into the project processes, most flavors of agile make change easier and faster. This is another advantage and disadvantage at the same time. Why? Most of the time, change adds time. Change always impacts the schedule, for better or for worse. This point is often neglected when agile is being sold.
A team of experienced developers who are also experienced at Agile can have a high velocity and deliver MVPs quickly. When the whole company is on board with agile, everything can run really well, but it can take time to get to this point. The same can be said of waterfall, the difference being that most people think that they know how waterfall works, even though people on the same project can have a different understanding and expectations of how it should work. The concept of how waterfall should work is something that everyone seems to expect everyone else to understand the same way that they do, but they often don't. I guess you could call this a disadvantage.
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1 reply by Sachin Pate
Feb 08, 2017 11:12 AM
Sachin Pate
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I do agree with the points.
Also I would add the integration issues. If there is big enterprise wide application development for some initiative, it would be difficult to manage and have integration testing done for the built features. Inter application dependencies will be difficult to manage in such environment.
In what context? Team member, stakeholder, or customer? Which flavor of Agile? How waterfall was intended to work, or what it has become?
Some projects are better suited to one versus the other; not every project can realize the benefits that often get sold as part of agile.
One of the most talked about (and oversold) advantages to agile is that something gets delivered faster than anything would have been delivered following the traditional approach of delivering everything all at once. This can also be a disadvantage, especially if your stakeholders do not have an agile mindset, because what is delivered is not necessarily the final product and you can't always set a hard deadline for delivery of specific features. Instead, it is an MVP - minimum viable product - and work continues to deliver the next piece of the MVP. Eventually, you can get everything you want, but there is no guarantee that it will be faster.
While traditional approaches do incorporate change management into the project processes, most flavors of agile make change easier and faster. This is another advantage and disadvantage at the same time. Why? Most of the time, change adds time. Change always impacts the schedule, for better or for worse. This point is often neglected when agile is being sold.
A team of experienced developers who are also experienced at Agile can have a high velocity and deliver MVPs quickly. When the whole company is on board with agile, everything can run really well, but it can take time to get to this point. The same can be said of waterfall, the difference being that most people think that they know how waterfall works, even though people on the same project can have a different understanding and expectations of how it should work. The concept of how waterfall should work is something that everyone seems to expect everyone else to understand the same way that they do, but they often don't. I guess you could call this a disadvantage.
I do agree with the points.
Also I would add the integration issues. If there is big enterprise wide application development for some initiative, it would be difficult to manage and have integration testing done for the built features. Inter application dependencies will be difficult to manage in such environment. Saving Changes...
Wade HarshmanScrum Master| GDITIndianapolis, In, United States
If you have a repeatable project with few unknowns and relatively stable scope, Agile frameworks offer few advantages to Waterfall. A project manager can carefully map out a project and run it over and over again, incorporating lessons learned each time.
Advantages of Agile become more apparent in projects with a great deal of uncertainty, or where the classic "triple constraints" aren't well defined. It's more adaptable when change is introduced through business needs or competitive environment. By nature, a waterfall project takes more time to plan and is more difficult to adapt when conditions change.
That said, I feel obligated to draw a distinction between a Waterfall "method" and an Agile "culture." Agile isn't a methodology, it's a set of values and principles that an organization can adopt or reject. If your organizational climate requires detailed personnel management and project documentation, for example, then an Agile framework like Scrum is probably not well suited. Saving Changes...
I would add that just as there are many flavors of Agile, there are also many ways to use Waterfall. Even though I am a CSM and have led many projects using Agile techniques and methods, I often take umbrage with so-called 'Agilists' whose understanding of Waterfall is a literal interpretation of the metaphor. There is no reason why Waterfall projects can't be delivered iteratively or be managed to account for rapid changes or unknowns. I've been doing it for years.
Back to the question ...
In my experience, the primary disadvantage between Agile and Waterfall techniques lies in scalability. Most Agile methods fundamentally rely on a cohesive, self-contained, high-performing team. Putting a single high-performing team together for a small or medium initiative often presents organizational challenges. Assembling multiple high-performing teams for large projects dramatically increases the difficulty and time factors, not to mention communication and logistical challenges of disparate timezones and shared resources.
See my blog posts "Don't Get Screwed By Agile" at http://criscasey.com Saving Changes...
It depends on the project and the experience of the project manager. Little expertise can bring down agile or waterfall, Good expertise can make most agile or waterfall projects successed. Saving Changes...
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
Both things are not matter of comparision. Agile is an approach. Waterfall is a process model based on predictive life cycle model. You can use Agile with a waterfall process model. Saving Changes...
Andy SilberSenior Technical Project/Program ManagerSeattle, Wa, United States
Agile deals with uncertainty well. Waterfall deals with complexity well. If you have more than a handful of unknowns, don't do waterfall. If you have complex dependencies and long-lead times, don't use agile. If you have both, try an adaptive project management approach. Write me if you want to learn more. Saving Changes...
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
My recommendation is taking into account the following to not fail. With basement in quality you will have life cycle models (only two: adaptative or predictive), life cycle process based on those models (waterfall, sequential, others for predictive - iterative, spiral, others for adaptative), methods based on the life cycle process (SDLC, others for waterfall - SCRUM, DSDM, others for iterative), tools that supports the methods. What you can find in the basement (quality) are different approaches that some could argue if belongs to quality umbrella or not, but there you will find PMI approach to project management, Agile, Lean, and others. Beyond that, each time you have to introduce something inside your organization you have to make an enteprise analysis to evaluate the impacts. I wrote an article that was published by the PMI and the IIBA as "best practice". Perhaps it helps to you: https://www.projectmanagement.com/blog-pos...-right-solution Saving Changes...
Seema SonkiyaHead Business Analysis Practices, PMI-PBA trainer| iZenBridge Consultancy Private LimitedJaipur, Rajasthan, India
Just to add - disadvatage of using Agile could be like, we are incrasing the cost of inspect and adapt cycle, when output is very much clear. You know very well what needs to be produced and how it is going to develop. Like making a same Burger in a fast food center, you know what and how very well as it is repetitive process and has almost zero uncertainity. If uncertainities can be managed for 2-3 months, you can use iterative life cycle – which gives an access to handle uncertanities which are at medium level. If you going to use waterfall in inventing new burger then definitly you are making a mistake of using waterfall as many things are uncertain like how it would be accepcted by customers and how it would look like. You need to desgn a set of customer representative who can provide you feedback in shorter cycles.
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