First article Review MIT 248

In software development we have one of the most common debates. The Iterative versus the plan driven approach. One of the most wildly use of the plan driven model is the waterfall. The waterfall emphasizes on a very well thought plan prior to the actually development. The waterfall methodology is very rigid. That everything should be well thought or the requirements should be well establish. So from that point you could tell that the waterfall methodology focus on the requirements. If you focus on the requirements that is really good but sometimes the user requirements are sometimes is not what the user wants.  Rather when the project is already finished then some problems will arise because even if the developers have done a very good job in delivering the requirements. There will always be some functionalities that was not taken account of so sometime the output is subpar or it don’t really reflect what the user wants. That’s a big problem if you are dealing with a big project especially if a company would depend on the for their business. But is there any way to include the user on the development process? There is this one methodology called agile that does not focus on a very well planned approach rather it focuses on iterations. This iteration a kind of like the small versions of the final product and every iteration the user will test and will comment about the progress. This means that some improvement of the project could be done while still developing the system. This will also show some functionalities that the user want that wasn’t included on the original plan. This would also give a very good picture to the developers of what actually the users want. This means that the methodology does not focus on the requirements but it focuses in the user. Were the user have a big part on the development. This also show the flexibility of the methodology. Were the developers could change the product before it would be release.

There is a great advantage of being flexible and adaptive. Which the agile is good at. It adopts at every iteration of the process. So in my point of view adapting an agile methodology is a god thing especially that technology and solution are always changing.