Agilefall—Modern Realities of IT Project Management

Abstract

The necessity to maintain the workflow in the context of the forced disunity of society caused a high demand for the services provided by software systems. It suddenly turned out that the quality of many widely advertised software products is much lower than expected. One of the reasons is that a different category of users with different quality criteria started to use these products. Another reason is that products, and especially Internet projects, have drastically decreased their quality to an unacceptably low level for various reasons. The quality decrease mostly happened due to errors in project management, in particular, due to an inadequate software development methodology. Taking a look at the scale and significance of a modern software project, the desire to execute it according to one of the classic models becomes clear. It would provide quality but increase development time. However, developers’ desire to stay ahead of competitors forces them to reduce the development time, albeit with a loss of quality. Traditionally, agile methodologies have been used in this case. They dramatically reduce the “unproductive” phases of the life cycle: the formation and analysis of requirements, planning, and testing. And the larger the Internet project, the higher the risk of quality loss and the higher the cost of the loss. Finally, the project might become unacceptable. What should be done in order to avoid this? How to combine the benefits of both approaches without getting their disadvantages?