Wells Fargo Waterfall Approach

Cost and resource needs are higher for traditional than Agile due to Waterfall’s sequential development phase of all requirements determined in the beginning, software design and finally implementation of master design. The need for all information up front takes substantial time to gather and the sequential design does not allow for project changes as the flow enters into the programming stage. With Agile, costs remain low because there exists an incremental and iterative approach to the project, meaning less time is used to collect all requirements up front, the

Using the waterfall approach the system developers will be able to focus on one piece of the system and move on each part separately. This will give the design team more time to focus on small sections of the new coding. Moving from one stage to the next means that each step has been checked thoroughly and is completed.

Thus, Agile came into play. This is a faster and smaller method over traditional. Stakeholders get together with small teams to look at cost, resources and expected time frames. This team figures out the computer verbiage, checks and balances, verification coding, iterations, number limits, scripts, all in the early stages of development.

Using the Agile approach enabled us to organize the software project into chorological order from the User Requirements to the End product. The requirements were formed by meeting our client Fernando on regular bases discussing the requirements of the program. He would assure

After having reviewed definitions and perspectives by three author groups, I’m inclined to conclude that waterfall methodology is essentially defined by its insistence upon the completion of product development steps in a sequential manner in order to accommodate a client’s need for a product or tool that will enable their business to be performed in a temporally defined effective (or desired) manner. By utility, for the sake of quickly delivering a product to the satisfaction of its client, a development team who employs the waterfall method may do so because of waterfall’s logical yet rigid structure. Its step-by-step nature promotes an easy to follow guide, though many of the tasks involved in the process of its development are anything but easy. Further, waterfall’s rigid nature seems to reinforce the notion of its logic, if but for the sake of timely product completion and client budget. Due to its methodological rigidity, however, products developed by way of waterfall may tend to be rigid in their own right.

By adopting Agile practices, the organization will pursue consistent, successful delivery of projects regardless of company department or project size.

There is a cross section of projects ranging from a few weeks to a few years. There are also a wide cross section of customers, those capable of articulating clearly their requirements and the ones that are not clear on their requirements and the overall outcome to be achieved. The level of programmers within the Information Technology Department, where development work is executed, range from intermediate to advance or above average programming competence. The Waterfall approach is easier to manage and can be utilized for projects where there are clear requirements and the project is determined to be a long term one. Also, this method may be best suited given the organization’s requirements for thorough documentation and project accountability, when it comes to budget and cost. The Agile methodology can be used for projects where the requirements as well as the expectation from the end product are not as clear. The developers that are above average in terms of their competence can also use this method. In addition, the Agile method is also best suited for the projects that would require rapid

From my perspective, though not being privy to a genuine cost analysis, yet being well versed in areas that do impact our financial well-being – most notably where challenges in back-end scenarios could be met more immediately and internally rather than hired out and realized on an external vendor’s own timeline – I will provide an analysis that clearly displays the benefits of agile methodology over our current use of waterfall. With this essay, I intend to provoke change, though I do understand that further consideration and discussion will be required prior to any realization of meaningful change.

There has been a lot said in the last few years about Agile project management methodologies, and I have found that the general feeling is that Agile although not perfect tends to provide better results in software development projects than waterfall and other methodologies. People tend to be very opinionated about it, and in my experience there three dominant positions about Agile: you either love it, hate it or you don’t care, in other words, you do not believe in methodologies at all, you think they are all a waste of time and effort.

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.

The traditional development method requires the definition and documentation of a stable set of requirements at the beginning of the project. It was inherited by other projects mainly related to construction which focused on the completion of one phase of production before moving on to the next phase, for example, laying the foundations of a building first and then proceeding with the further stages (Bowes 2014). Similarly, in Waterfall, the requirement gathering and designing work is done upfront before any coding takes place. The basic notion behind the traditional development approaches is that the projects are comparatively less complex, linear and predictable with clearly defined system boundaries which makes it simple to plan and follow without having any room for changes (Spundak 2014). Moreover, traditional development method depicts the requirements document as he key piece of documentation. The gathering of all the requirements, getting a sign off from the customer and then starting with the development of the project gives the project a limit of

how they should be applied, none have used project data to clearly conclude which one is

Focus is kept on the recurrence of condensed work cycles and also at the functional product yielded by the outcome, but in waterfall technique only once chance is been given to the development team to keep the project aspects right. But under the agile technique each and every feature of development including the design, requirements, is thoroughly checked under its lifecycle (Mahfuj et al, 2012). There is always some time to steer in another direction if a team stops at regular interval say after every two weeks and re-evaluates the project done.

Other methods include the waterfall, which is the traditional method and is almost become obsolete. This is because it was very expensive. It tangles the whole project and the team works in unity to accomplish the whole project. One mistake can drag the whole team behind, and it is difficult to debug errors. Feature driven method is another method which is costly because it focuses on providing the best of every part of the project. Process pride has a negative effect on timing and cost. Joint application development is the inverse of the agile software development strategy. It takes the project as a whole and work is assigned progressively without a work breakdown structure. It is good for very small software projects, but dangerous for lengthy software development projects (Kaufman, Perlman, & Speciner, 2002).

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.