Agile Software Development with a twist.
At Level Up Development, we’ve taken a custom approach to help our clients realize their vision. Traditionally the Waterfall Development approach was taken by consulting companies Through our many years of experience we found that Waterfall Project Management is no longer agile enough to keep up with current day development needs.
Waterfall came first
A little background first: Waterfall development is a sequential design process in which progress is seen as flowing steadily downwards — like a waterfall. It has been commonly used in the software development process since the 1970s with phases including Conception, Requirements Gathering, Analysis, Design, Construction, Testing, Production Implementation and Maintenance.
With waterfall development, the first 20 to 40 percent of the project time is spent on the first two segments of the project before any other actions are taken. With this being the case, the entire application is designed by a small subset of stakeholders using spreadsheets, word documents and often complex project management software.
Once the requirements list is generated and validated, the development effort starts. After another 30 to 40 percent of the budget is spent on development and testing, the end users can finally get a crack at the end product.
Because no one is perfect — and it’s often one person’s opinion versus another — the final product often has to go immediately into a maintenance development cycle. During this period, the development effort is focused on making changes recommended by users in order to make the solution accomplish the goals it was set out to do.
Why Agile?
As you can see, this is a costly and time-consuming process. There has to be a better way — and there is: Agile project management methodologies. The key difference between Agile and Waterfall processes is that Agile prescribes small, iterative performance of the design, construction and testing tasks. So instead of planning out the entire application, the implementation team is now planning out one or two core features at a time and then releasing them to their intended user base for immediate feedback.
This process significantly reduces the time and cost it takes to get the software into the hands of the users. The switch was pretty much a no-brainer, and many progressive internal development teams attempted changing their project methodologies to some form of agile methodology in the early 2000s.
Fast forward to 2015, and most consulting companies still operate under the waterfall methodology which appears to fulfill the need of quoting a project in order to present a bid to a prospective client. But this process easily leads to an inaccurate quote, as by the time end users see the product, there’s a good chance they will request significant changes. This often leads to change-request nightmares and disagreement on what was originally agreed upon during the original scope creation.
Not just engineers but consultants as well.
At Level Up Development, we recognize the benefits of agile methodologies and have fine-tuned them to ensure continued success for our clients. Our unique process allows us to project an estimated cost for a solution, make sure that the development cycle stays on track, and produce an end product that allows your users to provide feedback the entire way.
