


Many development tools required specialized training, and there wasn’t anywhere near the open source or commercial software components, APIs, and web services that exist today. We developers were expected to know “the spec,” as the complete documentation was called, just as well as the documents’ authors did, and we were often chastised if we forgot to properly implement a key detail outlined on page 77 of a 200-page document.īack then, software development itself also wasn’t easy. The whole process could easily take a couple of years. This waterfall software development process would finally kick off coding, then integration, and finally testing before an application was deemed production ready. This document defined the application’s architecture, data structures, object-oriented functional designs, user interfaces, and other nonfunctional requirements. Technologists took the business requirement document and developed their own technical requirements document. These business requirement documents were long, detailing everything: overall strategy, comprehensive functional specifications, and visual user interface designs. Someone, usually the business analyst, first wrote a business requirements document that captured everything the business needed in the application. The software development process required a ton of documentation up front before any coding started. Old hands like me remember the days when the waterfall methodology was the gold standard for software development. Responding to change over following a planīefore agile: The era of waterfall methodology.Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.Working software over comprehensive documentation.Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.They wrote four major principles for agile project management, with the goal of developing better software: Whether you are new to agile application development or you learned software development decades ago using the waterfall software development methodology, today your work is at least influenced by the agile methodology.īut what is agile methodology, and how should it be practiced in software development? How does agile development differ from waterfall in practice? What is the agile software development lifecycle, or agile SDLC? And what is scrum agile versus Kanban and other agile models? Īgile was formally launched in 2001 when 17 technologists drafted the Agile Manifesto. Every technology organization today seems to practice the agile methodology for software development, or a version of it.
