LevelTen's Experience With Two Project Life Cycles

While there are 4 project life cycles adopted for software and web development, LevelTen primarily works within the Waterfall (also known as Serial) and Iterative cycles. While all project life cycles provide advantages and disadvantages, these two have been widely accepted and adopted by software, IT, and web companies alike. Both were developed to manage project risks, but one is probably more suited than the other depending on the amount and type of risk involved you your project. To explain, let’s first start by providing a brief overview of the Waterfall and Iterative life cycles. If you would like a very in-depth understanding of life cycles we recommend reading The Pragmatic Programmers, “Manage It!” This book is fantastic for beginners and experts alike. The Waterfall Life Cycle Using the Waterfall life cycle, your team is supposed to be able to first obtain every conceivable requirement (Project Planning and Strategy). Based on those requirements the team moves into design to determine the look and feel of the system. Once everyone agrees on the “big picture”, the team starts developing. All pieces are developed, completed and integrated before testing begins. Serial life cycles take longer because they are supposed to be able to predict how much a project costs, how long it will take to implement features, and how quickly defects can be fixed – things that are inherently unpredictable. Many business stakeholders prefer waterfall life cycles and fix-bidding projects up front with a very high-level overview of features and services, and for good reason. It’s very reassuring to know exactly how much a project will cost before you spend any money on it. Basic websites which include static, brochure-type pages thrive from this type of development process because there are few technical features with less complex programming requirements. However, if your web site requires functionality including e-commerce, CRM/CMS integration, or any type of community involvement, we highly recommend utilizing an iterative, incremental, or agile life cycle. Trying to use the waterfall approach on these types of projects will most certainly set your project up for failure. The Iterative Life Cycle LevelTen uses an iterative life cycle for projects that require more complex planning and development. The incremental life cycle looks a bit like the waterfall approach at the beginning of the project for the requirements and analysis phase, but utilizes chunking features (as seen in illustration above) through the remainder of the project. This chunking helps align and manage expectations by allowing the customer and project team to see working prototypes of pieces of the system as they are created. This early review allows much greater flexibility for development, testing and changing so the customer gets exactly what they want. Instead of spending 2-3 months in preparation and low-level requirements gathering, then building out all features and testing them before release, we recommend spending one month understanding the feature sets, determining which features are most important to the customer, then developing, testing and releasing features on monthly increments. While the project’s timeframe and price are not fixed at the beginning of the project, the inherent nature of developing this way has proven to reduce cost and increase the potential of success exponentially.