Agile development models vs. traditional waterfall

In these times of dramatic economic recessions the discussion about the business contribution of IT projects are getting louder again, since many projects have exceeded budged and schedule and delivered questionable value to the enterprise in the past.

Changing to a development model that is driven by business value and that provides early business value is overdue for organizations which still apply a traditional waterfall driven approach. Especially for high dynamic markets projects that delivers in a big bang approach are not appropriate, because markets are changing faster than the release cycles of large system environments.

So an incremental delivery model and an evolutionary and adaptive attitude can be key success factors to compete in highly competitive markets.
In the past agile methodologies (e.g. extreme programming) were perceived as being exotic and only applicable for small project that deliver less business critical software in small teams of some weird geeks.

Since a few years agile development proved to be successful for large scale projects which deliver highly business critical solutions -  methods like SCRUM and DSDM are becoming mainstream approaches.

Key characteristics of the Agile approach are:

• Incremental delivery in time boxed iterations (delivery in time!)
• Business value driven (no efforts spend for invaluable features!)
• Evolutionary and adaptive (project adapts to changing environments!)
• Early risk mitigation (risks are addressed early in the project!)

This help to increase

• Business contribution of IT projects
• Quality and customer experience
• Cost efficiency
• Early delivery & short release cycles