The most immediate difference between agile and traditional methodology is in delivery. In the traditional method, the team makes a big delivery at the end of the project. In agile are made smaller deliveries, small changes gradual in the software, but more often, throughout the project.

Another big difference is the sequence of tasks. In a traditional project, activities are sequential; one starts after the other is 100% complete. In agile development, the idea is to do a little bit of each activity all the time, allowed the team to learn from small steps, and that decisions and plans to adjust to customer feedback. The agile methodology understands change as an inevitable part of any software creation project.

Software development models mainly help organizations to product the projects in a smooth way by using specific methods and techniques. In fact, finished product does not mean that it is ready to use by users. Because, some problems might be difficult to be understood and not easy to be used for the reason of complex design. Generally, there are some factors to achieve to a successful finished project, and the first one is to choose a proper methodology to develop a project. One of the methods making software development process to be more effective is Agile software development method.

Traditional software development methodologies or waterfall model is a way to get design, development, testing in a huge bunch and together it used be released. If there is a change needed after the signoff on design, it used to wait till the current cycle is over though it is of priority.

Agile works differently:

On a daily basis the scrum master has knowledge of status of current iteration items along with feasibility of demonstrable small chunk of items release.

It gives flexibility on:

1. Clarification

2. Prioritisation

3. Holding of blocked task

4. Additional task intake with capacity

5. Continuous Integration

6. Continuous delivery

Lot's of good descriptions of Agile vs traditional waterfall development styles. I'll just add that one of the game changers for us has been "Test-Driven Development" which can be thought of as an agile method or tool. Having a complete set of unit and regression tests allows fearless refactoring, which makes an agile approach practical. Wikipedia has a good article on the subject.

Hai.,

The main difference between traditional and agile approaches is the sequence of project phases – requirements gathering, planning, design, development, testing and UAT. In traditional development methodologies, the sequence of the phases in which the project is developed is linear where as in Agile, it is iterative.

In Agile the requirements can keep changing: In Waterfall, it is very hard to change requirements - you need to go through a painful change control process. Agile embraces changing requirements. From the Scrum Guide: The Product Backlog is dynamic; it constantly changes to identify what the product needs to be appropriate, competitive, and useful.

In Agile the tasks(Smallest piece of task/feature) is defined, then it's out come also defined, what are the scenarios and their outputs are clearly defined. If any doubts we can clarify it in the Story times or in Planning times from the Product Owner itself, who is the final authority of the product. In traditional way we are working on functionality which has a lot of small tasks and interrelations, there is no such a clear distinction which includes to which tasks.

Agile has a single authority for prioritising: Agile names the Product Owner as the single authority for prioritising. In Waterfall there is no such designated authority. It is often decision by committee.

using Agile methods the project developed incrementally to the user and customer can early use it and work with the developed teams for modification, the teams members work easily and daily with each other and with the customer to developed the final project version during few months.

but traditional methods need more times to complete the project and testing it without the present of the customer during development, this take more time and error may occurs

What is traditional Software Development in the first Place? Waterfall model? Rational Unifified Process? eXtreme Programming? Scrum?

Agile or not: all these models share the basic activities of software engineering:

Strict waterfalling enhances a step by step approach and not falling back into preceding activities within one cycle. It is a model that is suitable for the 60s and and early 70s when software systems were developed for research and military purpose predominantly. The requirements could be gathered in one big package back then.

During the 80s Barry Boehm proposed a different model, the spiral model. I really recommend his IEEE-paper concerning the need for a different approach. The 80s became the days big businesses got their hands on IT to add value to their products or run their companies more efficiently. Due to a lack of knowledge of IT in economy constant risk analysis and an iterative approach (repeating the basic activities in more than one shorter cycle) the spiral model of Boehm remains the reference model for all iterative process models of software development from here on.

The 90s kicked off with the RUP (Rational Unified Process) by Kruchten of Rationale Software focusing on:

This process stays relevant to this day for being able to handle even the biggest system as long as the resources are provided for the RUP.

During the late 90s and early 2000s two things happened. Kent Beck was hired to rescue a big project of an US-American car manufacturer. Second thing is the

Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

The first event gave us eXtreme Programming (XP) which is the birthplace of Agile Development in my opinion. Even smaller iterative cycles (Sprints), a whole bunch of new best practices for development just like the onsite-customer and story-centered-development (User Stories).

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development addressed common problems of the dotcom-boom-era like customers having absolutely no idea what they want and how they want it but still want their piece of the internet-cake anyway. Therefore having working software at the end of each iteration and being responsive to change are just two pillars of pure agile software development written down by 17 pretty impressive persons in the software-engineering-world. This Manifesto is the mindset to start with in the agile kind of doing things :-) Modern outputs are scrum and whatnot.

Long story short: time went by and the environment for software development changed radically. You mentioned agile as the solution for meeting changes in requirements. I disagree.

If you understand the system's context, the stakeholders, the desired impact of the system to build, you will be able to framebox the environment you're developing in. With this in mind choosing the right process or even a combination of them is the road for proper development. Agile Development is just a bunch of processes and methods suiting certain (not all) environments. As in all things in computer science: the scope defines the workload.

If agile development were the answer to all challenges concerning requirements you should have tried to "scrum" a system with a legal authority in any country of the world. You will find yourself at the edge of a waterfall long before the first backlog item is written...

I appreciate your taking the time to answer my question. It has really helped me

Ademar França de Sousa Neto Nada N. Saleem Gideon Mekonnen Jonathan Kasim Khusanov Gyana Ranjan Panda William F. Costa C K Gomathy Unnikrishnan Puthenveetil Gleiston Guerrero

Traditional software development methodologies are based on pre-organized phases/stages of the software development lifecycle. Here the flow of development is unidirectional, from requirements to design and then to development, then to testing and maintenance. In classical approaches like the Waterfall model, each phase has specific deliverables and detailed documentation that have undergone a thorough review process.

Traditional approaches are suited when requirements are well understood – for example, in industries like construction, where everyone clearly understands the final product. On the other hand, in rapidly changing industries like IT, traditional development procedures might fail to achieve project goals. Below are the major disadvantages of traditional SDLC methods.

• Problem statement/business need has to be defined well in advance. The solution also needs to be determined in advance and cannot be changed or modified.
• The entire set of requirements has to be given in the initial phase without any chance of changing or modifying them after the project development has started.

Unlike the traditional approaches of SDLC, Agile approaches are precise and customer friendly. Users/Customers have the opportunity to make modifications throughout project development phases. The advantages of Agile over traditional development methodologies include:

• Though the problem statement/business need and solution are defined in advance, they can be modified at any time.
• Requirements/User Stories can be provided periodically implying better chances for mutual understanding among developer and user.
• The solution can be determined by segregating the project into different modules and can be delivered periodically.
• The user gets an opportunity to evaluate solution modules to determine whether the business need is being met thus ensuring quality outcomes.
• It is possible to create reusable components.
• There is less priority on documentation which results in less time consumption and expenditure.

Agile proposes an incremental and iterative approach to development. Consider Agile Scrum Methodology to get a good understanding of how Agile processes work. Scrum Master plays an important role in Agile Scrum Methodology. A Scrum Master interacts daily with the development team as well as the product owner to make sure that the product development is in sync with the customer’s expectations.

Nice Contribution Gleiston Guerrero

You may check these 2 papers

Article Comparative Study on the Software Methodologies for Effectiv...

Conference Paper Comparative Study within Scrum, Kanban, XP Focused on Their Practices

Sabbir M. Saleh Dear Sabbir Thank you so much for the articles you shared.

I do research in software engineering. You and I have a common field of research. I am very eager to cooperate in this field. if you interested kindly contact me via email

I think that agile is not the "miracle" project management methodology to use by default as every project has its own context (environmental factors, stakeholders, requirements, ..).

I find the Framework "Disciplined Agile" which is proposed by the PMI very useful as it helps project manager through a toolkit to choose the methodology or a combination of methodologies to use for managing their projects.