How Agile Development stands out from traditional Software Development Approaches?

It goes without saying that

“A well managed software project is executed in an efficient manner”.

In order to manage a project efficiently, the development officer or dev team are provided to choose a software development methodology which works best for a given project in a given timeline.

Agile development is one such methodology which exists around for some time in american and many other european countries as well. However, there are many other methodologies which have fared well in the past for many software development organizations.

In this article, we are going to discuss how Agile methodology stands out in comparison from traditional software development approaches.

Origin of Agile Methodology and downfall of traditional software development approach

Traditional software development methodologies consists of a pre-organized stage of the software development lifecycle. It embraces a unidirectional flow of development which includes different stages that goes from design to development, then to testing and maintenance.

Typical approaches such as traditional ones are well suited when requirements are well understood. For instance — Some industries like construction where the end requirement is clearly understood, it will perform well. On the other hand, these approaches might fail to achieve the project goals in the sector such as IT where the end product requires continuous rebuilding and maintenance.

Below are some of the major disadvantages of traditional SDLC methods:

• For the traditional approach to succeed, problem statement and business requirement should be defined well in advance. The end product also needs to be determined in advance and can’t be modified or changed.

• The whole set of requirements have to be defined in the initial phase, there is no scope of changing or modifying them after the execution of project development.
  Agile software development originated as a reaction to traditional approaches to software development approaches. Initially, it was promoted as a movement but gradually, people started seeing it as the alternative to waterfall technique.

As a result, it was soon adopted by people because of its customer-centric and team-oriented approach. At PromptBytes, we are Atlanta app developers and Agile fanboys. For us, the software development method was slow to start, but we soon figured it out that it is something which is favourable for our business.

According to a recent survey of development and IT professionals, the vast majority of organizations surveyed reported that they primarily use agile methods.

Figure below represents that Agile showed slow incremental growth through 2008 and then sharply accelerated growth once it began to gain traction in the market.

Agile beat the odds to remain the most-widely used Software development approaches

Not unlike the conventional methodologies of SDLC, Agile methodologies are precise and client agreeable. Clients/Customers have the chance to make alterations all through task advancement stages. The benefits of Agile over customary improvement techniques include:

• In spite of the fact that the statement/business needs and arrangements are characterised ahead of time, they can be adjusted whenever.
• Necessities/User Stories can be given occasionally inferring better opportunities to common comprehension among designer and client.
• The arrangement can be dictated by isolating the venture into various modules and can be conveyed intermittently.
• The client gets a chance to assess arrangement modules to decide if the business need is being met in this way guaranteeing quality results.