Choosing a lifecycle - agile or waterfall?

A business critical decision before a development even begins is selecting the most appropriate project lifecycle for success. It is essential that the business sponsors and project managers be clear in their own mind about how they want to run the project. A 'one size fits all' approach may have the benefit of a familiarity; however, often a project can fail from the beginning because the project approach is inappropriate for the business goal. The development approach must factor in the real world constraints and success factors from the start.

Some clients may require a working prototype to bring to life the business requirement, or to raise funding/sponsorship. These types of projects require agility. We have delivered a number of systems where a business visionary has worked directly with a team of experienced Lost Wax developers, iterating through several designs and releases to get the desired system. Based on this experience we know that early releases will need to meet the duals goals of flexibility and ability to change, whilst being designed for longer-term scalability and extensibility.

On the other hand, some of our clients prefer to follow their own standard project lifecycle, or a number of complex interfaces to existing production systems may be required. We are skilled in specification-based life cycles. This approach requires a clear definition of the scope, boundaries and interfaces of a system. The project phasing and critical path must be clear to ensure that all of the project partners are in step. The successful completion of formal tollgate reviews and multiple levels of sign-off strictly control progress from one phase to the next.

Either approach has its advantages and risks. During the preparation of our initial proposal our team will work with the client to determine the best lifecycle for meeting the project goal and business requirements.

Lost Wax project lifecycle experience includes:

• Waterfall based methodologies (e.g. SSADM, Prince 2) - characterised by a phased approach with checkpoints between each phase and the production of detailed requirements, functional, technical and test specifications.
• Agile techniques (extreme programming, scrum, crystal) - a rolling iterative approach to development. Working in strict time-boxes and with immovable deadlines, but with the flexibility to deliver functionality on a business priority basis. A key benefit of agile techniques for our clients is our ability to cope with changes or refinements during the development process, without automatically increasing the budget or missing critical deadlines. This often requires the client to trade-off functionality against the available time-boxes. However, this is invariably a more productive process then the traditional change management approach, which can be bureaucratic and result in additional costs for the client.
• DSDM - this is our preferred agile methodology, which offers both the benefits of initial feasibility investigations and functional specification, with the advantage of time-boxed development slots. It is Lost Wax policy for all staff to be proficient in the DSDM methodology.