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Essay On Software Development

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Software Development has evolved immensely over the past few decades and especially in the past few years. We have seen an increase in the demand for software across all platforms. Electronic device usage is growing worldwide and every one of those devices requires software whether it has a user interface or not. Think about the transportation industry, semi-autonomous vehicles are offered by many different auto makers with more and more of them announcing their plans to automate driving each year. The software that runs this aspect of the vehicle only has a small user interface footprint but the requirement for software development perfection has exponential consequences. This is becoming the norm in our everyday lives. More and more…show more content…
Since the method was developed for manufacturing and construction projects, it made sense in these industries that a portion of the project was fixed and unchangeable after a phase completed. Imagine the construction of a road, you prep and lay down a foundation then eventually lay down the final asphalt or concrete layer. It wouldn’t make sense to build in the ability to go back and change the foundation after the top layer was set. Obviously, software engineering is very different and therefore requires a much different approach to development. Besides slow turnaround, there were many other criticisms of the waterfall method. Some included redesign, rework, and retesting due to lack of knowledge about requirements when a project began. Also, due to the extremely long lead and delivery times, requirements changed or projects were dropped altogether leaving a company with a half-built loss on the balance sheet. An industry average put the estimated time for any software project using the Waterfall approach at 3 years. This was the environment that enabled a few forward-thinking developers to meet and design a new and better approach. They met first in 2000 but it wasn’t until the winter of 2001 that they delivered their Agile framework to the software community. A manifesto was written that outlines the Agile framework
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