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Waterfall Methodology Essay

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There are many development methodologies for creating information systems. One of the more popular methods, developed in 1970 by Winston Royce, was the waterfall methodology. The waterfall methodology required that a team follow a prescribed sequence of five major steps when developing an information system. The project phases are linear and performed in a very methodical order starting with requirements analysis, then moving to design, followed by implementation, verification, and finally maintenance (see Exhibit A.). This methodology has been in place for many years but the highly structured methodology posed some major challenges. One major problem is when the business users dramatically change the requirements in later phases. This results in major rework and in some cases even project failures. With the advent of the Internet and Web-based technologies, the systems development community needed a more flexible methodology as projects were under greater pressure to deliver systems faster. Then in 2001, a small team of technologists created an iterative agile development methodology which forced systems development efforts to be broken up into smaller manageable timeframes called “sprints”. These iterative sprints contain a set of manageable system components allowing the teams greater flexibility when producing software (see Exhibit B). According to the Agile for Dummies text, “Agile is an attempt to make the process of software development lean and effective, and it’s

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