Agile vs Waterfall

About the last two years, many companies in Indonesia have followed the trend on developing IT system using Agile methodology. The most widely used framework is Scrum.

Agile is very different from the conventional methods used in the development of IT systems. Conventional methods also known as Waterfall methodology.

The most significant difference between Agile and Waterfall method is the staging, project timeline and size of development team or project team.

Agile characteristics include simpler staging (project initialization, development, test, deployment, maintenace — incremental enhancement will be executed during maintenance stage), small applications, time required from the assessment until UAT or Go-live is short, incremental and complex team member.

Waterfall characteristics include longer staging (assessment, analysis, development, key-user test, enhancement, key-user test, enhancement, end-user test, security test (SAT), training (nursing period), deployment, maintenance), enterprise applications such as ERP, or in-house development, longer timeline and small team involved.

Strong Points of Agile:

# Low development cost.

# Time saving.

# Suitable for Ad-hoc projects or small project design.

# Less customized framework.

Weakness Points of Agile:

# Large integrated project team member (Scrum member) is required, exclude Project Owner and Scrum Master.

# Relative will be immature system.

# User satisfaction index is low.

Strong Points of Waterfall:

# Small team member needed (Product Owner, Project Owner, System Analyst and System Developer).

# Mature system and well-tested.

# Best practices and universal.

# User satisfaction index is higher.

Weakness Points of Waterfall:

# High cost.

# Spend longer time for developing the system.

By considering each characteristic, it can be concluded that Agile methodology might not be used for all types of system development, especially for enterprise systems. We still need to mix between Agile and Waterfall at this moment. (MFI)