The growing popularity of the Agile Development, Feature Driven Development (FDD) and Extreme Programming and other Rapid Application Development (RAD) models pushing developers away from the traditional software development life cycle (SDLC) and system analysis and development (SAD). The managers and decision makers are in illusion of getting rapid production from the development team. The fact is, these practices (Agile and XP) may not be a good fit for all software projects and may even cost more than traditional SDLC’s mixed models such as traditional SDLC and Waterfall models if not followed properly.
In my college, I had a paper on Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Systems Analysis & Design (SAD), and Software Engineering each. I spent about 6 months just learning these three papers. In my early carrier, I learned how to put SDLC practices in real world software development by following SDLC phases - Requirements Gathering, Analysis, Design, Testing, and Maintenance. What happened to these practices today?
Today, I see more and more IT managers and decisions makers are leaning towards quick results. They don’t care if the final product they get is the optimal solution or not. In many companies, developers get requirements verbally (what document?? We don’t have requirement documents), and it is expected to done in next couple of days. Now, due to this stress, developers Google and get some code from a website (probably not the most optimized solution for a problem) and have it ready as soon as possible.
It is funny when in my code reviews, I ask developers what this code is doing and they even don’t recognize if they authored that code. I don’t blame them. The managers and decision makers are responsible for, who are looking for quick results.
It is funny when in my code reviews, I ask developers what this code is doing and they even don’t recognize if they authored that code. Welcome to the GDD Model.
What happened to those days when a team used to have design meetings and order some pizza and donuts? Today, many of IT folks bring their work home and hence causing more stress and even more divorces. LOL. You don’t believe me? Check out CIO warns many IT workes face dangerous stress.
Any way, here I would like to get some feedback from you to see how many of you actually follow software development design and life cycle practices, which practices and what is your typical development process.
Some more readings:
Software Development Life Cycle Models
Models for Managing Projects
Managing Job Stress: 10 Strategies for Coping and Thriving at work