Effective project management is crucial to the success of any software development project. The main goal of software project management is to enable a group of developers to work effectively towards the completion of a project. In the past, several projects have failed only because of faulty project management. There are several methodologies for project development.
The Waterfall Model
Thought the iterative waterfall model was very popular during the 1970’s and 1980’s, developers now face several problems while using it on present day software projects. The main difficulties include handling change requests from customers during product development, and the unreasonably high cost and time that is incurred while developing customised applications. Such factors led to the rise and popularity of the
The Agile Model
The Agile method of managing projects focusses to overcome the shortcomings of the waterfall model. Agility is developed by fitting the process to the project by understanding the necessary requirements and removing all the unnecessary activities from the project.
The Agile model is being used as an umbrella term to refer to a group of development processes. A few popular SDLC Agile models are Crystal, Scrum, etc. Let us have a look at the changes Agile has brought in.
A central principle of the Agile model is the delivery of an increment to the customer after each time box. In the Agile model, the requirements are decomposed into many small parts that can be incrementally developed.
For establishing close contact with customers during development and to gain a clear understanding of the domain specific issues, each Agile project usually includes a customer representative in the team.
Working software v/s Documentation
The Agile way of project management focusses mainly on working software over comprehensive documentation. This is the main reason why most of the startups and product based companies are trying to use Agile frameworks. Bigger consultancies are using Agile in bits and pieces as it all depends on nature of the project and client agreement.
The Agile way of project management has also been followed in large organizations like Robert Bosch, Honeywell, continental, Nokia, Samsung and Intel
The Agile methodology asks for more collaboration in every project. Teams need to use collaboration techniques to see the picture as a whole in addition to concentrating on the short-term tasks a hand.
Properly implemented, the Agile method can drastically improve the project management tasks with its emphasis on a structured yet flexible approach.