Software Development and Methodology

Agile Project Management Practices

The current mobile applications market continues to experience rapid expansion and growth because of ongoing improvement of mobile platforms in terms of performance. The rapid growth and expansion is also fueled by users' increased need for a series of mobile applications. As a result, software or system development for mobile platforms and applications has also experienced tremendous changes given the unique characteristics and constraints that apply to many product lifecycle stages. There are different models for the development of a mobile application including waterfall and agile models.

Waterfall model is a linear (or traditional) approach of developing mobile applications whereas agile is a certain kind of Rapid Application Development that is relatively new and usually implemented using Scrum (Lotz, 2013). As evident in the outlines, waterfall and agile models differ with regards to the stages involved in product development. Waterfall model adopts a linear approach, which is characterized by the conventional stage of product development such as conception, design, implementation, testing, and maintenance. Each stage in the model generally finishes before progression to the next stage of the development lifecycle. In essence, performance of one of the phases in the development cycle requires the completion of the previous stage and its associated tasks.

On the contrary, the agile model is a team-based, iterative approach for developing mobile applications. This methodology focuses on the rapid development of an application based on its complete functional components (Lotz, 2013). Unlike waterfall model which creates tasks and schedules, the agile model is divided into phases known as sprints. Each of these sprints has pre-determined duration with specific list of deliverables, which are established before the commencement of the sprint. The list of deliverables is prioritized and arranged based on the business value presented by the customer. While it's important to complete each sprint, work is usually re-prioritized and the information used for future planning if all deliverables for a sprint are not accomplished. This methodology also largely relies on high level of customer engagement during product development as compared to the waterfall model. Given its iterative nature, the agile methodology has more comprehensive stages in software development unlike waterfall model which relies on conventional stages.