Are there any pros for the waterfall model testing vs agile? [closed]

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I have read much information about agile and waterfall and I just cannot think of any reason why someone today should do the waterfall. I am concerned especially about testing process. Do I miss something, is there some clear advantage that I have overlooked?

Answer 1

There are still cases where waterfall is appropriate. Canonical examples include military, space, medical and safety-critical systems such as flight control software where you absolutely need to determine the spec first in exact detail, develop it, then thoroughly test the complete product.

Agile works for most business and product software (i.e. the majority of software built) because it allows users to start with a rough idea and refine it as they go along. If their website or internal line-of-business application isn't quite right (or has bugs) for a few iterations then it is generally outweighted by the business value that's delivered quickly from the bits that do work. You wouldn't want to start with a rough idea for a nuclear power plant controller system and refine it as you go along.

The trade-off of using pure waterfall is that it is orders of magnitude more expensive to develop software in these scenarios. However, the cost-benefit is still favourable since you cannot afford for (say) your spacecraft to hit a null pointer exception halfway into orbit.

There are of course shades of grey in between. It is possible to use Agile techniques within a waterfall framework (see RUP) and the balance can be scaled up and down between pure waterfall and pure agile.

Answer 2

One of the main pros of the waterfall model of development is that it has been used for years and years to develop. It works. Even though there is a large shift and focus on agile, waterfall is a very clear process with start points and end points for each section of the development.

With the introduction of agile programming it is easy to see the falls of waterfall and how it is not as adaptable to the demands of programming these days.

As long as you are careful and plan ahead and test sufficiently I would say testing in agile can be as effective or even more effective than waterfall - it is certainly easier to work with agile when testing throws a few bugs that can cause design changes your way.

Another thing to consider is developing using, test driven development. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development

Answer 3

Outsourcing

I have seen many companies stick with waterfall for outsourced projects. Most vendors will be very specific when it comes to pricing quotes. Waterfall suits this model quite well - you hand off what you want, they produce it. I'm not a fan of this, but I can understand the reasoning for executing this way. I think most outsourcing companies will eventually find a way to become more agile as it becomes more of the industry standard.

Answer 4

The answer to the question depends on what kind of development methodology you are using for your project. Is it agile/Is it waterfall/etc etc. Over the past three to four years I have been part of projects that involved only Agile or only Waterfall, so will be using them as my reference point. If the requirements of the project keeps on changing we should never go for a waterfall design , since waterfall methodology assumes that designing/analysis/etc has been finalized while if we go for agile it is based on an incremental approach where we divide our project into incremental stories and building/testing as we go along, so if the requirements change it does not involve to much of re-work from developers as well as the testers. For example say we have to create four new web pages as part of our project, then waterfall assumes that their design etc has been finalized and that testing will start once all the four pages have been developed while incase of agile what happens is we first develop one page and hand it over to the QA for testing [manual/automation], and so on. Thus we can see that agile adds value to our project by not making it susceptible to requirement changes in addition to finding the functionality flaws/bugs at the time of development.