Agile versus Waterfall Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Agile versus Waterfall - Essay Example System development is a team based activity which is completed by following a particular project management approach. In this scenario, a project management approach is a map which guides the software development team all the way through the project life cycle. This paper presents an analysis of two different project management approaches in the context of an e-commerce web site. This paper basically compares and contrasts agile and traditional project management approaches. In this scenario, we are going to manage the development of an e-commerce web site. I have been assigned the responsibility of a project manager to manage our company’s e-commerce Website where customers can browse the company’s products, place orders, and interact with the company’s customer service representatives. We have been given a deadline of three months to complete this project and we have approximately twelve people in the team. There are three offshore developers in Ireland and two QA testers in Dallas, TX. In addition, the remaining project team and the product owner are in San Diego, CA. 1. Comparative Analysis of Agile and Traditional Project Management Without a doubt, agile project management approach has been developed to deal with a variety of issues and pitfalls those were not addressed by the traditional project management approach effectively. In this scenario, some of the important issues can include delivering high quality software promptly under quickly and continuously changing business environment and requirements. It is believed that agile project management approaches have an excellent reputation in the IT and software sector. The research has shown than more than 69% of IT firms are adapting one or more of agile methodologies for use in common project management as well as organizational development (Lucia & Qusef, 2010). In spite of all the attractions that have been brought by the agile project management approaches, a large portion of sta te-of-the-art organizations (in all the categories e.g. packaged software, web-based software, or software/hardware systems) still adopt the traditional approaches to project management that have already been used for so many years. One of the most attractive features of this traditional project management approach is its support for the requirements documentation. In this scenario, this documentation includes requirements documents and specification documents. However, it depends on the firms who they use these terms. In fact, in many cases these two terms may indicate the same thing and are identical, or in some cases they can indicate the completely different parts of the process. In this scenario, the title of the document is not important, however its intended idea and information is delivered in some way with the purpose that the technical team could get an idea of the intended solution to a market problem that is being resolved with what goals. Normally, smaller project and u pdates can have a limited set of documents, while a larger, riskier project can require more documentation (Product Arts1, 2012; Kotonya & Sommerville, 1998; Product Arts, 2009). The research has shown that the requirements engineering process heavily depends on documentation for knowledge sharing while agile project management approaches are based on face-to-face collaboration and communication between developers and customers in order to reach similar goals. In this scenario, agile project management approaches do not take into consideration the documentation aspect effectively. On the other hand, in traditional proje