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Agile or Waterfall: What's Best for Your Software Project?

When HubSpot’s development team started working it was clear to them that they are going to work agile. It was equally clear to Raytheon’s air traffic control development team that they should use traditional methods like waterfall (and CMMI). And if Raytheon would have decided on agile I would never fly again. However, these projects are in two ends of the spectrum for many in the middle the answer isn’t obvious.

I recently went on a business trip to San-Jose California to help establish MIT’s product realization lab. I met with managers in Cisco software and E-bay and learned that this is an important issue. In fact, E-bay uses both methodologies depending on the project.

To come at the right conclusions development teams should consider organizational, product and industry characteristics. I developed this questionnaire with 8 questions. By filling it out and summing the points, one can arrive at the most suitable method for a given project.

Questionnaire

Rank each question in a scale of 1 to 4

Industry related questions (uncertainty, time to market)

1. How uncertain are costumer needs in your project?

1 being high uncertainty and 4 low uncertainties

2. How important is time to market?

1 being critical and 4 not critical

Product related questions (reliability, dependencies, maturity, and type)

3. How important is reliability (or safety) of the product?

1 being not critical and 4 critical

4. How would you describe the impact your project has on other projects/products?

1 being a standalone project and 4 being part of a cross-functional product

5. How would you describe the maturity of the product?

1 being new product (no legacy systems) and 4 being maintenance of mature product

6. How would you describe software type of work?

1 being not algorithmic / analytic intensive and 4 being algorithmic / analytic intensive

Organization related questions (disparity, culture)

7. How close is the development team?

1 being co-located and 4 located in multiple time-zones

8. How would you scale the organization’s culture?

1 being developer centric and 4 developers as back office culture

Score of 8-16 recommendation: Agile

Score of 24-32 recommendation: Waterfall, Spiral or another traditional method

Score of 17-23 recommendation: ?!?

Some tips on how to answer the questions. Consider a diverse set of projects and rate yourself in comparison to them. Examples: car brake control software needs more reliability and safety than help-desk software. Time to market is more critical for a startup with cash for 6 months than to a fortune 500 company.

Finally, a warning: this questionnaire was not validated by empiric research (yet).

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