After some of the downfalls of the traditional Waterfall method and to increase the efficiency in software development projects, a new approach was needed; and that new approach was Agile. Agile became so popular that most of the companies’ aim was to switch to this new methodology. I have heard a lot of project managers saying “We are trying to go Agile but we are not quite there yet.” or “We started following Agile principles but unfortunately we couldn’t integrate it all until now.” Is it too unfortunate not to follow Agile strictly by the book though?
It is awesome to show the client something that works, get approval and move to the next step. Working on a project for months and then realizing that changed requirements, extra modifications or unexpected surprises affect the initial phase of the project, might cause some considerable panic. And you need to go back to the beginning, change things and rebuild on top of it. Jenga!!
It is also great for developers and other team members to have scrum meetings and communicate effectively (scrum time poker cards are my favourite!). It lights the project path for everyone. Yes Agile is great, but do we need to turn away from Waterfall once and for all? There has been a lot of very successful projects that have been completed by Waterfall through the years. Some project managers love it because they can plan the project from the beginning, it provides the discipline for meeting the schedule by following each task, and since everything is planned in the beginning it leaves no room for surprises. We can’t blame them because if it is a large project the software development life cycle can be hard to organize and track.
Many companies use Waterfall for their infrastructure projects and they build their software applications using Agile. Likewise, executives choose to make their high-level plans using the traditional approach but their development team prefer Agile methodology. Workfront Group supports this idea stating, “The bottom line is that, in today’s world, the rigidity of a Waterfall project is still needed, but also there is a need of responsiveness of an Agile approach. It’s important to remember that communication is key when mixing the two in the same environment”.
Actually, Agile and Waterfall can exist in the same place and maybe in some cases they must. They both have great benefits for a variety of projects and when I hear “Unfortunately we couldn’t fully switch to Agile yet!” I don’t think it is unfortunate at all.