Your Guide To Software Development Methodologies (Agile, Scrum, Waterfall, SDLC, Extreme ...)

Models like Agile, Extreme Programming, Scrum or Waterfall are used by project managers, business analysts, software developers or quality assurance analysts to describe how a project is managed or a software product is built.

The software development life cycle determines how risks are managed, business requirements documented, resources estimated and allocated, stakeholder expectations or customer feedback is managed and when software / quality assurance testing is performed.

Each software development model recommends a set of guidelines or best practices for developing software.

It is then up to an adopting organization to follow these guidelines from the inception of their project.

Choosing the right Software Development Life Cycle is important because it helps your project team reduce or eliminate the risks of project failure which occur as frequently as 60% of the time.

Software Development Life Cycles are also important because they help deliver a better product or user experience.

In a nutshell, software development practices like Agile, Extreme Programming, Waterfall, Lean Software Development, Rational Unified Process (RUP), Scrum will help your project team meet or exceed customer or business requirements, deliver products on time or under budget.

Meeting Business Requirements

Software Development Life Cycles help with clarifying when or how software requirements will be gathered and analyzed in a software development project.

In software methodologies like the Waterfall model, business requirements are collected, analyzed or documented extensively at the beginning of the project.

In other software models like Agile or Scrum, requirements are gathered or analyzed multiple times during the life cycle of the project.

While opinions differ as to which software model helps you gather better software requirements, each model still offers the benefit of a formal plan for gathering, analyzing or documenting business requirements.

Engaging the Best Minds or Resources

Some Software Development Life Cycles like the Waterfall model are more traditional with their “top down” team structure or project management approach.

Other software models like the Agile or Scrum models are flatter in their team structure or more self organizing and independent.

The benefit of following a software development model is that it helps with organizing or structuring the project team’s roles, responsibilities or communication style.

Reducing or Eliminating Time or Budget Overruns

Statistics show that as much as 60% of Information Technology (IT) projects fail for various reasons including time or budget overruns.

This is where choosing the right software model can be helpful.

Each software development life cycle offers a set of best practices for estimating project resources, planning project deliverables or product features and monitoring timelines or milestones.

While some software models like the Waterfall emphasize time, budget or resource estimation at the beginning of the project, others like Agile or Scrum emphasize time, cost or resource estimation & planning throughout the life cycle of the project.

Managing the Software Development Process

Each Software Development model divides separates the development process into a set of activities which makes the project more manageable.

While some Software models are sequential, others are iterative.

Software development models separate your development cycle into phases which helps with project planning, resource utilization and progress monitoring or control.

Creating Better Software Products

Software development life cycles can help with meeting or exceeding customer expectations as well as creating better software products.

Your software development model will provided guidelines for creating test cases or mapping test cases to requirements or product features.

Software models provides guidance for quality assurance analysts or software testers, on when to execute tests, record bugs or defects and measure or report on the quality of the software product.

How To Adopt A New Software Development Life Cycle

An organization may be incapable of taking advantage of a software development model in-spite of the merits of the model.

Here is my advice on adopting a new software development model

1. Evaluate your Company Culture: consider the flexibility or willingness of your company to change or adapt.

   I have seen organizations with a top-down management culture fail at agile models because they were not ready to give up some control to an agile, self-organizing team.

2. Take Small Steps: don’t try to change too much, too soon, when adopting a new software development model.

   Over-committing at the early stages of your project raises a red flag because it means that your project team is being expected to run before it has learnt how to walk!

3. Get Executive / Organizational Commitment: get someone with senior management or executive authority to back the adoption of the model or it may not survive corporate politics.

Sometime ago, I functioned as the Information Technology Director of a re-manufacturing plant in the Ozarks.

One of the goals I set for my team and employer was to get them to adopt a formal software development model.

Before I started running with the implementation of that model, I spent time coaching the CEO, the quality assurance and product development directors, and other senior managers on the benefits as well as potential challenges of the new software development model.

Because I had strong organizational commitment and backing, the software model was finally adopted without any incidents.

Which Software Development Life Cycle Is Best for Your Project?

With all that has been said in mind, i have prepared a downloadable study guide that will help you with choosing a software development model for your project!

The study guide which you can download below covers answers questions like:

1. What is Agile, Scrum, Waterfall?, Lean Software Development, Extreme Programming …
2. What are the advantages, disadvantages, challenges or benefits of adopting a software development model …
3. How does Agile compare to Waterfall … And More ….

• Which Software Development Life Cycle Is Best?

  This study guide provides a comprehensive review of software development methodologies including scrum, agile, iterative development, lean software development etc.

  With the information contained in this study guide, you will be in a better position to recognize which software development ...

• Download The Study Guide: Which Software Development Life Cycle Is Best?

  Download This Study Guide

  

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Business Analyst Boot Camp Training Curriculum

Business analysts come from a wide variety of industries and from varying backgrounds. Because of this, you need to be flexible in your expectations of the type of work you will perform as a business analyst.

More than 50 major domains or industries that hire business analysts including the web development, web design, e-commerce, software development, information and marketing industry.

As the business analysis industry matures, software developers, database designers, software architects, project managers and professionals with diverse backgrounds are taking on formal business analysis jobs.

As a software development team begins to improve its development processes, many people become Business Analysts simply because they begin picking up the requirements gathering and analysis tasks that are left lying undone on their team.

These are the Accidental Business Analysts. They did not plan to take on the title, and in some circumstances, many still bear titles other than “Business Analyst”.

Like programmers, business analysts seem to come from different backgrounds.

One business analyst that I worked with in the past had a degree in computer science. He worked as a programmer for many years on our team.

He eventually became our business analyst because none of the rest of us wanted to spend time with the customers. For some strange reason, he was eventually promoted to team manager!

Another business analyst I worked with had a degree in business. He was hired as a systems analyst with the Federal Reserve Bank.

Even though he had no real background in technology, his role was to talk to managers about what they needed in the systems and translate and communicate those needs to the IT personnel.

Other business analysts I am acquainted with have backgrounds in biology, literature and even theatre!

While those business analysts who took college classes in business and computer science may have been introduced to the process of requirements gathering and business modeling, most did not. Where do they get their skills from?

As an Accidental Business Analyst, chances are that you start out simply winging many of your tasks and responsibilities. Even in situations such as these, your ability to lead, understand and communicate with customers, your understanding of your business domain and your ability to express customer needs to IT and vice versa will serve you excellently.

However, as the business analysis industry comes to maturity and you begin to grow your career, you should take the time to understand what a business analyst really does.

You should move towards excellence by finding out what makes a good business analyst, sharpen your requirements gathering and analysis skills, your business understanding and even your interviewing skills.

A little UML and Use Cases wouldn’t hurt you either? You will want to understand how to balance the business side of a project with the IT side of the project.

You should grow your value to your company by learning how to take a high level view of business issues as well as getting down to understanding processes and how systems support these processes.

The Business Analyst Boot Camp provides complete end to end training for business analysts.

The Business Analyst Boot Camp training is designed to be an in-depth online business analyst training that takes you from beginner to mastery in all the skills and competencies you need to be a great business analyst.

The high level summary of the Business Analyst Boot Camp curriculum is below. If you would like to download the detailed curriculum, request for the detailed business analyst training curriculum here:.

INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS ANALYSIS COURSE

1. INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS ANALYSIS

REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING COURSE

1. REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING
2. ADAPTING PRACTICES TO PROJECTS
3. AGILE REQUIREMENTS METHODOLOGY

CREATING THE BUSINESS CASE COURSE

1. DEVELOPING VISION AND SCOPE
2. MAKING THE BUSINESS CASE

RISK ASSESSMENT AND MITIGATION COURSE

1. RISK ASSESSMENT AND MITIGATION STRATEGY

ELICITING REQUIREMENTS COURSE

1. STAKEHOLDERS & REQUIREMENTS SOURCES
2. ELICITATION TECHNIQUES

ANALYZING REQUIREMENTS 1 COURSE

1. THE REQUIREMENTS ANALYSIS LIFE CYCLE
2. PRIORITIZING REQUIREMENTS
3. BUSINESS PROCESS MODELING CONCEPTS & PRACTICES

ANALYZING REQUIREMENTS 2 COURSE

1. RELATIONSHIP MAPS
2. PROCESS MAPS
3. CONTEXT DIAGRAMS
4. EVENT-RESPONSE TABLE
5. BUSINESS POLICIES
6. ACTOR TABLE/MAP
7. USE CASES I
8. USE CASES II
9. STORYBOARDS
10. DATA MODELING
11. STATE DIAGRAMS
12. BUSINESS RULES

SPECIFYING & DOCUMENTING REQUIREMENTS COURSE

1. CREATING A USER REQUIREMENTS DOCUMENT
2. CREATING A SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS
3. SPECIFICATION DOCUMENT

VALIDATING REQUIREMENTS COURSE

1. CREATING TEST CASES
2. CONDUCTING PEER REVIEW
3. USER ACCEPTANCE TESTING

MANAGING REQUIREMENTS COURSE

1. CHANGE CONTROL
2. ATTRIBUTES & TRACING

MODELING WITH UML 2.0 COURSE

1. UML ONE
2. UML TWO
3. UML THREE
4. UML FOUR
5. UML FIVE
6. UML SIX
7. UML SEVEN
8. UML EIGHT

INTRODUCTION TO OBJECT-ORIENTED CONCEPTS COURSE

1. OBJECT-ORIENTED CONCEPTS

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Requirements Engineering, Top BA Skill

When gathering or analyzing requirements, it is just as important to focus on the process that you are using to develop your requirements as it is to focus on the requirements themselves.

If you have a poor requirements elicitation or management process, you risk not understanding the business problem you are trying to solve or turning out a poor product.

The cost of Information Technology (IT) project failures has become so high that one can no longer ignore the fact that business analysts need to invest a good amount of time into understanding what they intend to build.

The good news is that a lot of thought has been put into the process of gathering and creating good requirements.

These thoughts have been gathered and structured into a discipline called Requirements Engineering.

Why Adopt An Effective Requirements Engineering Framework?

However, business analysts may not benefit from Requirements Engineering best practices in organizations where requirements management is perceived as a process imposed by the higher-ups or seen as an afterthought.

In between chasing down stakeholders for interviews, wrestling with use cases and models or managing conflict and corporate politics, the requirements engineering process may end up being treated as meaningless meetings or just paperwork.

What you may not know is that the reason you’re chasing down stakeholders or having so much trouble with gathering requirements is that you don’t have an effective Requirements Engineering framework in place.

Unless you break the cycle by doing research on what works and what doesn’t … the cycle of difficulty and ineffectiveness may be guaranteed to continue.

If your company does not have a Requirements Engineering framework, you can do your manager a good turn by implementing one for your team!

The fact that you do this certainly can’t hurt during your end of year performance review

What Does Requirements Engineering Mean To A Business Analyst?

Basically, Requirements Engineering encompasses all the activities and deliverables associated with defining a product’s requirements.

Think of Requirements Engineering as the software development methodology applied to requirements.

Requirements engineering includes requirements development and requirements management.

Requirements Development encompasses the activities and deliverables for Eliciting, Analyzing, Specifying and Validating requirements.

Requirements Management encompasses activities and deliverables for Establishing Requirements Baselines, Change Control and Tracing Requirements.

What Is The Value of Requirements Engineering To Your Organization?

Having a requirements engineering framework for your team will help you answer these questions:

1. Which member of your team is performing what requirements activity?

2. When will a requirements activity take place?
3. What are the details and steps of each activity is?

Having all of this formally defined will help your team reach its intended business goals.

Having a good requirements engineering process in place has been shown to have significant effect on a business analyst’s ability to develop correct requirements on time and within budget.

The best Requirements Engineering process to follow will be the one that makes your team the most productive and that produces excellent (correct, complete, clear, concise, consistent, relevant, feasible and verifiable) requirements.

As you develop a requirements framework, take into consideration your environmental constraints, corporate culture and the nature of the projects you are engaged in.

After defining your requirements engineering process, you must follow through and execute on the defined steps so that you can create a good product.

Where Does A Business Analyst Learn Requirements Engineering?

Take a moment now and add the knowledge of Requirements Engineering to your belt because it can only help make you a better business analyst.

Requirements Engineering is one of the several courses taught at the Business Analyst Boot Camp Training.

Traditional Classroom Business Analysis Training tends to be expensive because you have to pay for each core business analysis course like UML Training or Use Case Training or Requirements Engineering Training.

So, with class-room based training, you may end up paying for an “Introduction to Use Case” Class and an “Advanced Use Clase” class etc. just to get a complete A – Z “Use Case” Training.

That is in contrast to the Business Analyst Boot Camp Training where you get all the Use Cases + Requirements + UML Business Analyst Training and more … in one program

So why don’t you enroll now and complete all your business analysis training in one program?




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ABOUT TRAINING & COACHING COURSES




• Business Analyst Boot Camp - Online, Web Based, Instructor Led, Business Analyst Video Training


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• Software Developer Boot Camp - Online, Web Based, Instructor Led, Software Developer Video Training


• Data Analysts Boot Camp - Online, Web Based, Instructor Led, Hands On, Data Analyst Video Training


• Get Hired Fast - Online, Web Based, Resume + Job Search + Interview Video Training


• Become A Leader Coaching - Develop hands-on experience, gain domain expertise, solve industry problems, Stand Up and Be Noticed, market your career using PULL instead of PUSH techniques!









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