As part of my orientation week, I was tasked with familiarising myself with both the Waterfall and Agile project management paradigms. They can be better described as System Development Life Cycles (SDLC) as project management is not necessarily an accurate term for Agile as explained by Doug Rose:
Agile puts less emphasis on planning and more emphasis on adapting to change. And so you are not planning out a project like you would in project management, not looking at everything that your project will deliver, instead your planning in much smaller chunks.
Adaptability, flexibility, and deliverability are key elements of Agile, which utilises quick iteration, continuous delivery, and short development cycles. This starkly contrasts the Waterfall method which uses a cascading, linear sequence of stages with no overlaps and a monolithic structure that is either completed or is not. This critical path, useful for manufacturing can be too rigid for software development:
Waterfall project management came from manufacturing and engineering where a linear process makes sense. For example, building a house needs to follow a linear path where you'll always build the walls before you build the roof. But developing software isn't like building a house. In software the product is intangible, so exploration and experimentation are necessary.
Such exploration and experimentation would be cost-prohibitive for a Waterfall project, but with smaller sprints and deliverables, Agile can put them to good use. As discussed by Doug Rose (Rose, 2019), Agile can give valuable insights into how the rest of your product will look and function. Having a portion of a product that is feature complete, after a few sprints can help in gaining insights into what the customer's and user's priorities are as well as ample opportunities for feedback and reflection. Waterfall has a propensity for feature creep, its triple constraints of costs, scope, and time are intended to be fixed, but projects in the real world, evolve over time, which can adversely affect all three. Agile mitigates these issues while allowing for change.
Watching the videos regarding Waterfall and Agile supplied in our week 1 orientation, and subsequent reading regarding Agile has made me reflect on my own professional experiences with Agile. While not a perfect implementation of Scrum, the spirit of the process is kept with Sprint lengths being kept to two weeks; the team working off a backlog of tasks and a sprint backlog. The team conducts daily scrums where we discuss briefly our workload and blockers. However, we do deviate from the described format in several subtle ways. We have no Scrum Master and blockers and potential solutions are discussed with the team after everyone has taken their turn. The decision to use Scrum for the course also presents itself as a natural choice when referring to the video content supplied. The first video refers to the Waterfall method's inherent deficiencies regarding reflection and change, two very prominent features in the requirements of this MA.
There is no room for reflection, no accommodation for change over time and alot of risk as the development of the system happens very late in the life cycle.
The second video reiterates this point:
Lacking in flexibility or the processes to accommodate change throughout the development process.
I look forward to exploring the Agile paradigm in more depth during the course. Looking forward to the weekly topics of GDO710 Development Practices S2 I can see that Agile topics and themes are discussed frequently and I am intrigued to learn how it fits into the User Experience Design.
References
Learn.falmouth.ac.uk. 2022. Week 1: Time Management and Agile Development. [online] Available at: <https://learn.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/241/pages/week-1-time-management-and-agile-development?module_item_id=12900> [Accessed 19 January 2022].
O'Conne, K., 2019. Agile overview - Transitioning from Waterfall to Agile Project Management Video Tutorial | LinkedIn Learning, formerly Lynda.com. [online] LinkedIn. Available at: <https://www.linkedin.com/learning/transitioning-from-waterfall-to-agile-project-management-2019/agile-overview?autoAdvance=true&autoSkip=false&autoplay=true&resume=false> [Accessed 25 January 2022].
Rose, D., 2019. What is agile? - Comparing Agile versus Waterfall Project Management Video Tutorial | LinkedIn Learning, formerly Lynda.com. [online] LinkedIn. Available at: <https://www.linkedin.com/learning/comparing-agile-versus-waterfall-project-management/what-is-agile?autoAdvance=true&autoSkip=false&autoplay=true&resume=false> [Accessed 25 January 2022].
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