From the course: Software Project Management Foundations

What to know about waterfall and agile

From the course: Software Project Management Foundations

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What to know about waterfall and agile

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- In the project world, there's two competing frameworks. Waterfall and Agile. Depending on where you work, you may execute your software project using an Agile or Waterfall framework. Let's take a quick look at both of these so we have some foundational context. Let's start with Waterfall. Waterfall is often called traditional project management, and we'll use these two terms interchangeably. In simple terms, Waterfall is a series of sequential steps the project manager leads the team through. Based on your organization, the terms may be different, but generally speaking, the linear steps and sub processes are initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing. Each of these linear steps must fully complete before you and the team can move on to the next step. This is a pretty rigid framework, so anything that's missed in one of the sub processes can throw a wrench in the works. Common factors and software development projects that can throw things off are late requirements, increased scope, and gaps in the development tool set. These typically force the project manager to complete change request forms to update the documentation from past phases. Let's move on to Agile. Remember that Agile is a family of frameworks. With Agile, since it's a family of frameworks, you and your organization may choose scrum, extreme programming, or some other Agile framework for your project. For the sake of simplicity, we'll use scrum as our Agile model since it's the most common Agile framework in use. In Agile, project processes are the same, but they're handled differently. Projects still have to initiate, plan, execute, monitor, and close, but the approach is more flexible. What we see most often is that the initiation of a project is a quick step, lasting only a week or two to understand the project objective and pull the team together. From there, the project sub processes aren't linear. They're repeating on a cyclical fashion through the life of the project. In scrum, two week sprints are used to keep the sub processes moving forward quickly. In a nutshell, the team plans, designs, builds, and tests within the confines of the sprint. The goal is to learn quickly and produce working software every two weeks. For a deep examination of Waterfall and Agile, check out my course on how to transition from Waterfall to Agile project management. For now, it's most important to remember that no matter which framework you're using, software projects will need all of your skills to succeed.

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