Agile vs. Waterfall

Agile vs. Waterfall methodologies, difference between Agile and Waterfall, Agile vs. waterfall project management, Agile vs. Waterfall model

Waterfall is a development method in phases, where moving to the next phase is only possible when the previous phase is complete and once moved to a phase, it is very difficult to come back to a previous one. Waterfall was created in the 1970s by a computer scientist named Winston Royce who took the stage gate release waterfall process from engineering and adapted it to software development.

In waterfall, all the requirements have to be identified upfront, then analysis and modeling follows. After this steps, the actual development process begins, resulting in solutions that meet those requirements. The next steps are testing, quality assurance and deploying to production. In case there is any change needed that is discovered during the development or testing phases, the need is to go back to the requirements phase, do a lot of work of pushing that change step by step through all the phases of the waterfall process, which brings a very big delay in delivering the value to the customer. Also without any change coming after the requirements phase, overall value delivery and feedback gathering is taking a very big amount of time.

Agile vs. Waterfall methodologies

Agile was created to help solve this type of problems encountered in the waterfall process, especially in the software development industry. While waterfall is a concrete process with strict guidelines for how work has to be done, Agile is a mindset that focuses on thinking about the ways of working. The most distinct change in agile vs. waterfall is that agile allows delivery of value to the customer in small increments, which allows the end users to utilize the solution, see the value and provide feedback that adjusts the way the project is moving forward, while also identifying and solving the problems sooner, before they get to be big problems. Because agile is iterative, the development team is able to get feedback on their performance sooner and in a repetitive way, discovering what could be done differently, what needs to be adjusted to be more successful and to make the solution even more successful.

Challenges of the Agile mindset for organizations

Agile is difficult to implement as a mindset, frameworks and development practices in big companies using the waterfall methodology because agile changes everything, like the whole mindset of the company, organizational structure, the way different people and teams from the organization work together and that change has to happen everywhere in the organization, horizontally and vertically.

New and small companies can adapt faster and implement the agile mindset and practices because they do not already have processes in place, existing running contract limitations and they can start building the company culture with the agile mindset and values.

At the team level, many companies that embarked on the agile transformation journey are still using specialized roles and do not try to achieve cross-functionality in terms of the roles in the agile teams, which leads to a waterfall way of working at the team level, with reduced sequences of specialized roles waiting for the other role to finish the work.

Another challenge the big companies face in adopting the agile mindset and practices is related to scaling agile for a very big number of teams throughout the organization, adapting senior leadership, governance, portfolio and project management roles and responsibilities to a mindset of self-managed teams and servant-leadership.

Agile vs. waterfall project management

Agile organizations step away from long-term detailed planning, instead they have vision, goals and they inspect and adapt frequently on the way. In waterfall project management uncertainty is viewed as bad and many actions and experience is used in trying to avoid or limit it upfront. Agile product development embraces uncertainty as a competitive advantage, improving the product by adapting faster than the competitors.

In waterfall project management we have the triple constrains triangle of scope, time and costs and scope which needs to be kept unchanged throughout the project. Although the three should remain unchanged, in reality change occurs and it is handled in waterfall through a change management process where the change is documented and all three constrains increase in size. Agile is a paradigm shift that leaves the scope flexible, has it in the form of a business goal and embraces frequent changes to adapt it in an iterative way. This is also a shift from linear staged defined process controls to empirical process controls, where upfront planning is done just as much as it is needed to get the work started and future plans are done step by step based on experimenting and learning along the way.

Agile Software Development