Why It Needs More Than Agile Methodology?

Haan, J.  (2018). Why IT needs more than agile methodology. InfoWorld. Retrieved from https://www.infoworld.com/article/3285730/agile-development/why-it-needs-more-than-agile-methodology.html 

Summary

Johan den Haan, a contributor of InfoWorld Magazine, discusses about methodologies used nowadays in IT & Software Projects, mainly focussing on Agile concepts and whether it suffices to needs of current systems. According to the author, Agile approaches have been lately implemented across more platforms with companies gradually shifting to this methodology from traditional software designs.

He adds that the traditional Waterfall design follows a fixed progression, with phases of requirements gathering, design, development, testing and final product delivery. Hence this caters to needs of projects like traditional ERP, banking and HR, which have static requirements. Whereas, Agile provides an iterative style of project development, more flexible and favourable to the project developers, with provisions of tracking back to the previous stage in the model. Where this approach runs short is the lack of definite principles regarding developer-business user association and correspondence. Haan points out that project coders tend to ‘speak’ a terminology which might or might not be fluent to the business counterparts. The author advocates using visual-model based development techniques in place of code-based, which will provide an understandable bridge for both developers and business users alike.

Reaction

Johan’s article stresses on the first phase of an IT project i.e. choosing a software development methodology. The author comments on the Agile approaches and how it has gradually become popular.

I myself have worked in IT projects related to the banking sector, wherein the project started with Waterfall & Spiral models, but as the development progressed we felt the need for a more flexible method, a model like Agile which was more efficient in adapting to developer’s schedules and changing user requirements. The foremost advantage that we found implementing Agile were its capabilities to revert to preceding stages. Developer scrum meetings and business update meetings were regularly organized, so I as a developer didn’t feel the ‘disconnect’ between the coders and business users as mentioned in the article, everyone worked as a team to achieve final deliverables. But as the author suggests, there might be projects where users may feel that they are not on the same page as the development team; such projects need to be managed more efficiently. Of course, the model based design software and simulators like Matlab can aid in streamlining the communication between the business users and project developers.