Design Process : The Waterfall Model Essay

“Agile” was first introduced in 2001, by a team of software engineers looking to improve their adaptiveness and responsiveness to ever-changing requirements. Not knowing where to begin, the team began by formulating principles, which they would use to guide their new development process. Which, in turn, lead to the creation of the Agile Manifesto, and thus a new methodology was born.

The Agile Methodology Principles makes the development much faster because the primary importance is given to the customer satisfaction and continuously delivers product. Even though requirements change at the ending phase the product is developed. The Agile development insist the self-organizing team which can create requirements, best architectures, best models. The Agile development promotes a distinct way of thinking to build things and methods to deliver continuous improvement of product. It facilitates to make best practices and decisions together. It a development to promote the adaptive planning, continuous improvement, evolutionary development and delivery, and required time to complete work. It encourages for rapid response to change in the whole development cycle. The project team prefers agile development to move in a creative and quick way. The project progress also depends on working software and project environment and support is provided and built by the individuals. They promote the sustainable environment. Constant attention is provided to the technical excellence and best models are given by the agile methodology. This principle helps the project team members

One of the initial steps in researching a problem is to know exactly what the problem is and compose a problem statement that unambiguously identifies and defines the problem to research. Sekaran (2003) said, “No amount of good research can find solutions to the situation, if the critical issue or the problem to be studied is not clearly pinpointed” (p. 69). The area of research for this paper focuses on software development, in particular, the study of agile software development methodologies and if these methodologies are successful in delivering software on time, within budget, and includes the requested features.

Agile values Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools. Agile emphasizes the importance of individuals having interactions and engaging in collaborative thinking for software design and development.

It has been observed that in software development, change is unavoidable and must be accommodated for in the life cycle. A number of alternative process models have been introduced in order to attempt to fix the issues in the Waterfall model. An early modification to the standard Waterfall method introduced prototyping as a feedback and discovery mechanism to identify misunderstandings and omissions early on in the process (Neill, 2004). Other process models attempted to further get rid of the risks of misunderstandings by breaking down projects

Agile Software Development: The iterative development strategy focuses on incremental delivery of usable software ("What is Agile Software Development?", 2017)

Agile is an iterative and incremental (evolutionary) approach to software development which is performed in a highly collaborative manner by self-organizing teams within an effective governance framework, with "just enough" ceremony, that produces high quality solutions, in a cost effective and timely manner which meets the changing needs of its stakeholders [1].

In 1970 Winston W. Royce created the “Waterfall Method” which eventually became very popular with managers due to the logical flow from beginning to end. Winston’s original design involved 6 steps; requirements, design, implementation, verification, and maintenance it was later on when people started to customize the design and changed the requirements phase into the idea phase or just split the requirements phase into planning and analysis. As we move into the future the Waterfall method is very popular in software development since it is ridged, systematic, and sequential.

The original Waterfall model has a foundation that is supported by two distinct characteristics. First, the methodology is rooted in the fact that that the software be developed in stages. “Originally created by Benington in 1956 and later modified by Royce in 1970, the quintessential Waterfall model is linear and sequential in evolution, typically with milestones at each phase of development. (Pavolka, 2005). As seen in figure 1 (Ruparelia, May 2010), the typical thresholds consisted of Evaluation, Requirements, Analysis, Design, Development, Validation, and ultimately Deployment. The evaluation phase, at the aggregate level, helps to reveal the situation at hand. The requirements phase is arguably the most important phase of the Waterfall plan as it lays out the project statement and sets the framework and expectations for the project. The next phase, Analysis, works as a comparison between what capabilities are needed versus what constraints currently exist. That leads into the Design phase in which the software developers determine the architecture required to meet the customer’s expectations taking into account the constraints previously identified. Development is the next phase that takes the inputs from the Design phase and outputs a tangible product ready for testing. The testing or Validation phase is the process in which the software is checked for two things: a) any and all bugs are identified and removed and b) the original scope of work including all

Software development is one of the highest demands in all over the world. We use software development techniques to solve the problems and to satisfy customers. Agile software development is a conceptual framework for software; it is also a group of software development methods based on iterative development. In 2001, agile software development was created by seventeen people with a desire to find alternative approaches to software development. The most important thing about agile methods are team work, conveying information to the team, face to face conversation, and satisfy the customer. There are various methodologies but I am going to describe the most popular ones.

The waterfall model consists of five phases such as requirements, Design, implementation, verification and maintenance. The method is a sequential design process where progress is seen as flowing downwards in a steadily manner, each development phase has its own distinct goals. The model is similar to water flowing down a cliff it can only flow in one way and cannot go back up it is the same with waterfall development ,after a development phase is completed it proceeds to the next development phase you cannot go back.

In a paper titled “Software Development Lifecycle Models”, Nayan B. Ruparelia describes many of the different options when developing software including the Waterfall model. The Waterfall model was one of the first true models documented for software development and “has underpinned all other models” (Ruparelia 2010) since inception. Originally developed by Herbert Benington in 1956 and later adjusted by Winston Royce in 1970 (Ruparelia 2010), the Waterfall method became an important and widely used process to get software into the workplace. The model follows a pattern of evaluation, requirements, analysis, design, development, validation, and deployment. Royce’s model also allowed for “iterative feedback” (Ruparelia 2010) that allowed a group to move to a preceding step if feedback was needed. One of the key tenants of the Waterfall method is heavy planning and documenting with a key goal of minimizing risk during coding. Also, collaboration is low across phases as each group in a phase would play a different part in terms of requirements and validation. Traditionally, the Waterfall model is used to develop large and complex software rollouts that require different experience levels and backgrounds to accomplish the overarching goal. Once the software is coded and deployed, the documentation allows for better understanding of what took place if a process needed to be revisited. Other variations of the Waterfall model have been documented but the original version is

The SDLC adheres to important phases that are essential for developers, such as planning, analysis, design, and implementation, and are explained in the section below. It includes evaluation of present system, information gathering, feasibility and request approval. A number of SDLC models have been created: waterfall, fountain, spiral build and fix, rapid prototyping, incremental, and synchronize and stabilize. The oldest of these, and the best known, is the waterfall model: a sequence of stages in which the output of each stage becomes the input for the next. These stages can be characterized and divided up in

This paper discusses about Traditional Software engineering, Agile software development, the Waterfall software development model and also a new concept of Agile software engineering. After a thorough analysis of the paper, I could relate it to topics of Traditional Software Engineering (TSE) which is the process of developing software products. It deals with Cost estimation and budgeting, scheduling, Requirements analysis, Design, Implementation, Testing and Deployment, Measuring products and processes, Quality improvement, Maintenance and so on… Another concept that I could relate to was

The waterfall method is a linear, sequential, non-iterative process for software development first mentioned by Herbert Benington in 1956. The software development life cycle (SDLC) is defined by Ruparelia as “a conceptual framework or process that considers the structure of the stages in-volved in the development of an application from its initial feasibility study through to its deploy-ment in the field and maintenance (Ruparelia, 2010, p. 8).’’ This method is so named “waterfall’’ because the stages of the SDLC cascade down through the stages of product consideration, re-quirements, analysis, design, development, testing, implementation and review/maintenance.