The waterfall methodology refers to the sequential model of phases used by the software development industry in making products. It aims to address the issues of what milestones are expected, how goals may be achieved and when the product may be released.
It was first used by the manufacturing and construction industries in the 70s, but it was used for making hardware. Due to its effectiveness and efficiency, however, the software development and design sector adapted it to their own needs.
The phases of the waterfall methodology are illustrated below:
Requirements analysis. In this phase, the needs of the clients are identified, as well as the problems that the software product will fix for them. Use cases and customer interviews are utilised to set the customers' goals at this phase.
Design. In the design phase, things such as the hardware and software architecture of the product, performance and security parameters, designers and data storage constraints, IDE and programming language, exception handling, resource management and interface connectivity are defined and specified. The user interface that will be used in sorted out in this phase, too.
Implementation. This is where the actual building of the product is started, where specifications and requirements are followed. Another crucial thing to the phase is the separation of different roles and setting down the functions of each one in the whole team.
Testing. Testing takes care of ensuring that the product is built accordingly and functioning well so that customers' needs may be truly met. A Quality Assurance (QA) team deals with this phase.
Installation. During Installation, the software product is released to the customer. This may mean giving them the product through sending it over the Internet, or delivering it to them by way of physical media.
Maintenance. Maintenance takes care of the modifications and changes that must be done to the product, if clients found that live use of the software product came with some errors and bugs that have to be fixed soon. Also, every time an issue is fixed, a new version or release of the product would be sent to the clients.
Since every organization is different, the structure is different, etc. the needs are different as well. There are alternatives to the Waterfall methodology-the Agile, for example, has got fairly popular recently-and you may find out that they suit you better. Do your research, consult others who have experience with these and do the right thing.
It was first used by the manufacturing and construction industries in the 70s, but it was used for making hardware. Due to its effectiveness and efficiency, however, the software development and design sector adapted it to their own needs.
The phases of the waterfall methodology are illustrated below:
Requirements analysis. In this phase, the needs of the clients are identified, as well as the problems that the software product will fix for them. Use cases and customer interviews are utilised to set the customers' goals at this phase.
Design. In the design phase, things such as the hardware and software architecture of the product, performance and security parameters, designers and data storage constraints, IDE and programming language, exception handling, resource management and interface connectivity are defined and specified. The user interface that will be used in sorted out in this phase, too.
Implementation. This is where the actual building of the product is started, where specifications and requirements are followed. Another crucial thing to the phase is the separation of different roles and setting down the functions of each one in the whole team.
Testing. Testing takes care of ensuring that the product is built accordingly and functioning well so that customers' needs may be truly met. A Quality Assurance (QA) team deals with this phase.
Installation. During Installation, the software product is released to the customer. This may mean giving them the product through sending it over the Internet, or delivering it to them by way of physical media.
Maintenance. Maintenance takes care of the modifications and changes that must be done to the product, if clients found that live use of the software product came with some errors and bugs that have to be fixed soon. Also, every time an issue is fixed, a new version or release of the product would be sent to the clients.
Since every organization is different, the structure is different, etc. the needs are different as well. There are alternatives to the Waterfall methodology-the Agile, for example, has got fairly popular recently-and you may find out that they suit you better. Do your research, consult others who have experience with these and do the right thing.
About the Author:
For more information about waterfall methodology advantages and disadvantages, follow this link.
0 comments:
Post a Comment