What is the Waterfall Methodology for Product Development?

The waterfall methodology is a straight line or serial approach for software development and project management. The process emphasizes on logical linear approach for the progress of the project or product, just like waterfalls off the cliff never to return at the same place or the same point, the method also does not allow revisiting the completed segment of the project. Hence restricting any possible change at a later stage in development.

History of Waterfall Methodology

The term first appeared in a paper published in 1970 by Dr. Winston W. Royce. It was the first publicly documented life cycle model. This model was rapidly adopted by industries due to logical sequencing and ease of implementation.

Steps involved in the Waterfall Methodology

There are six steps in the model or we can say “ the six stages of falling water” poetically. The following steps are involved in the waterfall methodology.

1. Requirement and Analysis- The process of gathering information by various methods like brainstorming, group discussion, meetings, and by asking the right questions about the project will lead to the formation of requirement document which defines what an application should do but now how it does. During the phase of analysis, the specification of the system, finances, and resources is analyzed to check feasibility, generate project model and business logic that will guide the project.
2. Design — In this phase the decision is made over the technical requirements of the project like designing languages such as C++, C, Java, Python,R and various others, data layers and services. The business model’s technical implementation is decided and how it should be carried out until the very end of the project.
3. Coding — The work of the developer’s team practically start in this stage with all the logical implementation, business logic and services integration with the system is also carried out i.e. every decision made in the previous stages takes a physical shape or rather an idea becomes an entity in this phase.
4. Testing — This phase majorly consists of checking the source code by a whole lot of variety of testers like QA, Beta Testing and other testing departments. This phase involves a frequent repetition of the coding stage as errors are corrected there and sent for retesting.
5. Deployment and Maintenance- Finally after going through every stage of this process the development team becomes ready to give away the project to the client as per requirement mentioned by them. The work is not over yet, the project is to be maintained for a while because a variety of errors come up when the application gets live and is in the production phase.

Advantages of Waterfall Methodology

Although the waterfall model has experienced a great amount of loss in the last decade but there are some significant advantages of this model.

Change in the team- Since the model is not at all dependent on a particular person then replacing a team member is not an issue. The team can adhere to such changes.

Allows an early design change- The change in design/requirement can be done in the early phases of the method since no practical implementation or source coding is done in those stages.

Befitting to work on projects with deadlines- According to a common notion which states that the waterfall model is not good enough but with a strategic approach and a well-defined timeline the model will work fine with the projects with a defined duration and less number of changes.

Disadvantages of Waterfall Methodology

> Adaptive design constraint- one of the major drawbacks of the waterfall model is that it cannot adapt to changes after leaving the Information Gathering and Analysis phase.

Suppose a fundamental problem in the design (the problem is in the way a particular part is implemented) arises in the test phase then it would lead to a giant backward leap to correct it (if this is financially feasible ) or the team need to redo the whole work which would be a terrible idea as it would affect the core point of developing the project through waterfall methodology.

> Client Feedback/input process- Due to the step by step straight line procedure a crucial process of client involvement and feedback is not taken into account which often leads to too little or no feedback from the client-side. Those feedbacks are not even useful as they cannot be implemented in the project in the later stages or at the end of the project.

> Delay in testing- Even though testing is a crucial part of Software Development Life Cycle, but it is ignored till the end of the procedure. This not only means that the debugging procedure would be delayed but most errors would b-not be found until the very end, but also propagates lackadaisical (lacking enthusiasm and determination) coding environment as testing is only an afterthought.

To know more information on Web Development and Mobile Apps Development methodologies, feel free to ask us at contact@benchwork.in or visit us at www.benchwork.in