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BSA/375 Week 1 DQ 1

Write and post to the Main forum a 200- to 300-word short answer to the following question, by Friday:

Review the agile and systems development life cycle (SDLC) software development methodologies in your readings and in the podcast for this week. 

·       Explain the main differences between the agile and SDLC (waterfall) methodologies.

·       What types of software application development projects would be better suited for each methodology and why?

An agile methodology is a system that focuses on streamlining SDLC, it is flexible, able to be changed as problems or errors occur. Waterfall is dependent on each step being performed in sequence and is hard to find where the corrections need to take place. When using agile testing can be done at any phase to find errors in the program so that they can be corrected as the program is being designed. Agile methodology uses input from all levels of the development phase, the company, the user, and designers are all involved. Waterfall requires that the organization determines what program they want to develop and all the possible errors that may occur. Waterfall is also inflexible, meaning that errors cannot corrected until the testing phase. Once an error is encountered the programmer must start from the beginning and go through the whole program until the error is found, this makes development a long and tedious process. The main difference in agile and SDLC methodology is that agile is able to be tested at any stage in the development stage, whereas the SDLC waterfall has to be completed step by step. “Choosing a methodology is not simple, because no one methodology is always best” (Dennis, Haley Wixom, & Roth, 2012, p. 59). Agile methodology is designed to make software development easier and faster, although there is no right or wrong methodology. A manufacturing program would be best suited for agile programming as there are many instances of possible errors and being smaller...