Agile Vs Waterfall Which Methodology To Use For Your Project

The survey, conducted by Dimensional Research, reveals that agile methodology is now the norm with 88% of organizations stating that they have adopted it, compared to 82% in the previous year. Yet dig further and the Promised Land has not quite materialized. Organizations are not wholly satisfied with the pace at which they deploy a new build. Even though more than two-thirds deploy at least weekly (67%), this speed is still not considered adequate for many teams. When asked how quickly they would ideally like to release, almost half indicated they want a faster deployment (46%).

So if the business need exists and the desire amongst teams to work with agile principles is well-established, where are the roadblocks? The survey attempts to answer that by using five QA best practices as a framework to assess where the gaps may exist. First, the principles are set out as:

Development and QA work as partners to deliver applications

•  Development and QA teams communicate in real-time
•  Bugs are fixed immediately
•  Testing is highly automated
•  Development and testing is highly iterative

Central to agile is that teams work in tight partnership and the research suggests that this is a working reality with 86% reporting they see themselves as partners in the model of a Testing team captured bugs in a tracking system or writing long and detailed email threads will stymie speed. In Figure, We see that most companies (70%) describe day-today communications between Testing and Programming happening in real-time. A minority (25%) still use systems that are not real-time.

It can be argued that most agile teams are performing better than if a traditional waterfall approach is followed, with only 5% reporting that it takes more than a few days for most bugs to be fixed, but almost half still take many days to fix bugs (48%). it is also still found to go through the process of adding defects into a bug system for later prioritization and fixing, which will add to delays.

It is useful to note at this point that there are no real differences in terms of company size when looking at how successfully best practices have been adopted. The survey identified fully agile teams in very small as well as very large companies. Any software team with the right processes and focus has the potential to achieve the full benefits of agile, regardless of size.

Hybrid teams and skill sets will be needed as real value is not to be found in accepting agile's broader philosophy alone. The hard yards are now to be gained through harnessing the experience and know-how of teams in order to identify which practical processes will bring testing in line with the pace of development and delivery