Introduction
Software Process Model Articles Series,
- What is Software Development Life Cycle
- Waterfall Model Used In Software Development
- Iterative Model Used In Software Development
- Spiral Model Used In Software Development
- V-Model Used In Software Development
- Big-Bang Model Used In Software Development
The agile model is the combination of the incremental and iterative model that focuses on product quality and adaptability, and customer satisfaction by rapid delivery of working and fully functional software products. The agile process breaks the software product into small builds this build provides in iteration. Each iteration life cycle is two to three weeks, and every iteration involves the core functionalities of the system and a complete team working on these iterations in various areas.
- Planning
- Requirement Analysis
- Design
- Coding
- Unit Testing
- Acceptance Testing
Agile Model Design
The agile model believes that every project needs to be handled differently and existing methods need to be checked that best suit software requirements. In agile development, each task is divided into chunks with a time frame for the successful delivery of a specific feature. An iterative approach is taken, and a working software build is delivered after each iteration. Each build is incremental, and the final build is holding the features of the whole product according to the customer's requirements.
Agile Manifesto
- Individual and Interactions: In agile development, self-organization, and motivation are very important areas of interactions like co-location and pair programming.
- Working Software: The demos of the working software are the best way of communication in software development with stakeholders of the software product instead of just describing the documentation with all stakeholders.
- Customer Collaborations: In software development, the requirements are very important for the development of the software product to gather complete, clear, and rich requirements for software to interact with customers.
- Responding to change: In software development, responding to change is a challenge, and the agile model is focused on quick changes in continuous development.
Agile vs traditional development of SDLC
Agile is based on adaptive software development methods and whereas the other model follows the traditional approach based on the predictive approach.
Predictive approach
In the Predictive approach, the development of the software product only depends on the requirements and analysis that's done at the beginning of the software.
Adaptive Approach
But in the Adaptive Approach to software development, there is no need for detailed planning is required. But we focus on the clarity of the features we want to develop. There are feature development planning and product requirement changes dynamically. The product is tested repeatedly in the iteration, so a quality product is produced in the end.
Customer Interaction
Interaction in software development is the backbone of the agile methodology. Open communication and less documentation is the most typical feature of agile development.
Applications
The agile model is widely used in the software development industry given below points explain the usage of the spiral model in the industry.
Advantages of the Agile Model
- A very realistic approach to software development.
- Promotes teamwork and cross-training.
- Resource requirements are limited.
- The requirement can be gathered more accurately.
- Good software process model for the environment that changes steadily.
- Little or no planning is required.
- Easy to manage.
- Gives flexibility to developers.
Disadvantages of the Agile Model
- Not suitable for handling complex dependencies.
- More risk of sustainability, maintainability, and extensibility
- Depends heavily on customer interaction.
- Technology transfer to a new team member or another team may be quite challenging due to a lack of documentation.
- Very minimum documentation is generated during the development of software.