ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCES IN AGILE AND TRADITIONAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES

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TRANS Asian Research Journals

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ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCES IN AGILE AND TRADITIONAL

SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES

Aman Gupta*

*PGT (Computer Science), Madurai.

ABSTRACT

Agile software development is a group of software development methodologies based on iterative and incremental development process. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development and delivery, a time-boxed iterative approach, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change. Iteration involves a team working through a full software development cycle, including planning, requirements analysis, design, coding, unit testing and acceptance testing. Multiple iterations might be required to release a final product.

KEYWORDS: Agile methodology, waterfall method, traditional approach, incremental method.

__________________________________________________________________________ 1.INTRODUCTION

Agile is a technology which reduces the complexity of most our traditional approaches. “Agile” comes from the Latin word agilis, which means “easily moved, light, nimble, active”.

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Agile methods break tasks into small increments with minimal planning, and do not directly involve long-term planning. Iterations are short time frames. Each iteration involves a team working through a full software development cycle including planning, requirements analysis, design, coding, unit testing, and acceptance testing. This minimizes overall risk and allows the project to adapt to changes quickly. The goal is to have an available release of the product at the end of the iterations. Multiple iterations may be required to release a product or new features. Agile Management aligns the day-to-day activities of software engineers with the interest of the stock holders by focusing them on value delivered and time to market.

2. NEED FOR AGILE TECHNOLOGY

There are massive valid and significant business and IT reasons: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan 1.1 3. CHARACTERISTICS

Team composition in an agile project is usually cross-functional and self-organizing. Agile methods emphasize face-to-face communication.

Agile development emphasizes working software as the primary measure of progress. All agile software development, driven by client-valued functionality, is a “limits to growth” problem which can be managed by tracking the flow of value.

Value is defined as the ever increasing reduction of uncertainty of information Perfect information is working software which passes quality assurance tests. Identify bottlenecks through cumulative flow monitoring

Identify bottlenecks through cumulative flow monitoring 4. CHALLENGES IN TRADITIONAL APPROACH

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3. Good for stable, but expensive for dynamic environments

4. Require experienced personnel only at start if stable environment 5. Personnel thrive on structure and order

6.(I)COMPARISON WITH OTHER MODELS

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(II)AGILE DEVELOPMENT VS. TRADITIONAL DEVELOPMENT

A. "HEAVYWEIGHT" VS. "LEIGHTWEIGHT"

Traditional software development processes are considered heavyweight. They were described in comprehensive process documents and are too large. This approach suggests lots of documentation work during the software development process.

In agile Methods the only work product that one can measure project progress is "running software". Documents (if created) fulfill just thepurpose to create a running piece of software. In an agile team you prefer coding rather than documenting, if both of it leads to success. In addition, the process description of agile processes is very condensed. These processes suggest only a minimal set of work products and meetings. Therefore, agile processes are considered lightweight.

B. "MICROMANAGED" VS. "SELF-ORGANIZING"

Another essential difference between agile and traditional processes is in the freedom of acting individuals. In agile processes the developers can choose the tools, techniques and individual procedures that lead to success in their opinion. They organize and regulate themself. In traditional processes every little step that the individual is allowed to take is documented. The behavior of the individual is regulated by the process. The team is organized in exactly the way that the process suggests. That's probably one of the biggest issues of traditional processes: they define the complete process in detail without knowing the problem to solve. In agile processes the teams adapt to the concrete problem they have to resolve. They do that by self-regulation and self-organization.

C. "CROSS-FUNCTIONAL" VS. "PROCESS ORIENTED"

Another important difference in traditional processes and agile processes lies in the way they suggest to organize the teams of a project. In waterfall oriented projects you will often see that individuals are organized along the development process. You have an analysis team, a development team and a test team. In agile teams all skills are organized into one single cross-functional delivery team. That team includes the client, the businessanalyst, the developers, the testers and so on. That way every person involved gets immediate feedback about the work done. In a traditional organization the analysis team works on a functional specification and then they "throw" it across the fence. Then the developers wonder what the analysis team meant by all that. Continuous feedback about results is not build into that kind of organization.

D. “DEVELOPERCENTRIC" VS. MANAGEMENTCENRIC"

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the team going, not to get the management in control of the project. To me, the developer (the guy that has to do the job!) is in the middle of interests in agile process descriptions.

7. BENEFITS OF AGILE METHODOLOGY

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Agile development, in its simplest form, offers a lightweight framework for helping teams, given a constantly evolving functional and technical landscape, maintain a focus on the rapid delivery of business value (i.e., “bang for the buck”). As a result of this focus and its associated benefits, organizations are capable of significantly reducing the overall risk associated with software development.

In particular, agile development accelerates the delivery of initial business value, and through a process of continuous planning and feedback, is able to ensure that Madurai is continuing to be maximized throughout the development process. As a result of this iterative planning and feedback loop, teams are able to continuously align the delivered software with desired business needs, easily adapting to changing requirements throughout the process. By measuring and evaluating status based on the undeniable truth of working, testing software, much more accurate visibility into the actual progress of projects is available. Finally, as a result of following an agile process, at the conclusion of a project is a softwaresystem that much better addresses the business and customer needs.

8. CONCLUSION

The main purpose of this article was to identify, analyze, and summarize benefits of Agile Methods found in the best possible literature (e.g., experiments, surveys, and case studies). Not only did we find 69 studies with benefit data, but we found more, better quality studies with an average of 200% better performance than big and expensive Traditional Methods. Agile Methods are based on early customer involvement, iterative development, self organizing teams, and adaptability to change, which originated from agile, new product development approaches dating back to the 19th century. Agile Methods scale up to large problems. Agile, new product development methods have been used for many large-scale, complex research and development projects such as Lockheed’s SR-71, NASA’s Apollo, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s deep space probes. Agile Methods may not be in use by very large organizations. Agile Methods are used by 70% of small to medium-sized projects; however, larger projects use Traditional Methods, so the relevance of Agile Methods to large, complex projects needs to be convincingly made.Agile Methods can learn something from traditional methods. Agile Methods should apply traditional quality and reliability theory, which holds that defects are less expensive to eliminate early in the lifecycle and late defect removal has a negative, multiplicative effect. In conclusion, not all Agile and Traditional Methods are created equal, there are pitfalls for using any method with a low ROI, and there are lessons to be learned from the best software methods.

REFERENCES

1. Rico, D. F. (2007). Effects of agile methods on website quality for electronic commerce. 2. Rico, D. F., Sayani, H. H., & Field, R. F. (2008). History of computers, electronic commerce, and agile methods. In M. V. Zelkowitz (Ed.), Advances in computers: Emerging technologies 3. http://www.agilemanagement.net

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5.http://www.projectperfect.com.au/downloads/Info/info_agile_programming.pdf