Choice of a development model is usually determined by project peculiarities and customer preferences.
Our recommendations
Waterfall model for life-critical systems, that are rarely being changed or modified complete and their detailed analysis is done at the beginning of the project
Incremental model for life-critical systems and target systems, such as embedded software, games, programming tools, web-services
Agile (scrum) development for business applications, as they are characterized by
- requirements evolving and changing during the project
- customers requiring working code very early in the project
- scope and requirements significantly changing during the project life-cycle
Scrum practices
Development process goes in small, but tangible steps, rather than trying to plan everything upfront.
Approximate plans for the final result: before a project starts, preliminary plan, work efforts and team size are roughly estimated.
Flexible planning: before every iteration (3 weeks period) list of features to be implemented during this iteration is confirmed (sprint backlog). Customer could easily change requirements throughout development phase or change features’ prioritization to be included into next iterations.
Visibility: results (a number of features, always potentially working software) are delivered to customer every 3 weeks
Early bugs reveal: development and testing go simultaneously to reveal bug at the earliest stage possible, tester is inside development team, early reveal of required or unnecessary features
Good development speed: fixed and short duration for every delivery helps to keep intensive rhythm of work for development team
Clear communication: close, daily cooperation and integration inside the team (daily face-to-face meetings of the whole team, work in one room if possible) which lead to absence of unnecessary reworks due to possible lack of synchronization
Team responsibility: involvement of the whole team into tasks estimation results in increased feeling of their responsibility for final results
