When it comes to software development, any organization not adopting some form of Agile is wasting money and getting inferior results.
Years ago, there were good reasons to rely on a traditional “waterfall” methodology for software development. Businesses needed a way to offset the risks involved in creating applications in-house. High-profile disasters in the 90s and 2000s rightfully scared business leaders, who moved to put plenty of procedural hurdles in front of software projects before their release.
But the fact is that these reasons are no longer convincing. Businesses today are operating at a dramatically faster pace and are struggling to keep up with the competitive disruptions. New software is being brought to market at a faster pace than ever before, and if you are unable to develop your product quickly and change it to adapt to new conditions, the risk of developing a faulty or outdated product is incredibly high. On top of that, waterfall is more costly, more difficult to control from a management perspective, and makes it almost impossible to see what the end product will look like until the final phase of the development process.
The time when agile was an exciting, breakthrough methodology is over — today, it is an absolute imperative in the world of enterprise software development. If your company is not abandoning waterfall, it’s wasting money, creating inferior products, and putting you at risk of falling behind competitors.
Click here to read Don’s full article.
About the Author
Don Sharp is a respected innovator with more than 25 years of tech experience working at companies ranging from startups to Fortune 50 companies. A graduate of Notre Dame University, Don currently serves as Chief Executive Officer of Coolfire, a software company that delivers workstream collaboration tools to enhance real-time event awareness, control, and response.
