Spiral Development Is Out, Long Live Spiral Development

I heard a number of rumblings last week that government development projects are no longer going to use spiral development approaches. Spiral was the “silver bullet” of the past several years for complicated development projects.  Spiral development actually makes a lot of sense…. smaller, risk driven waterfalls where smaller bits of functionality are completed, then the next spiral is evaluated based on risk and customer needs.

Unfortunately once Spiral was “in” it appeared to me that many major programs just started calling their current approaches spiral without any other process changes.

So getting rid of an erroneous and misleading name is probably a good thing.  But the concept is still a good one.  I hope the industry doesn’t lose the potential benefits of spiral developments.

Of course SEER estimates the impacts of spiral or any other development methodology.  And the answers are not always what intuition might guess. 

Development should be approached with the processes most appropriate to the problem, agile works in the right circumstances, spiral works in the right circumstances, waterfall works, incremental, etc.  The important thing is to match the process to the goals and to the corporate processes and to the most effective schedule and effort.

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2. Total Cost of Ownership: Development is (only) Job One Planning software development projects is never an easy undertaking. Customer and competitive requirements, time-to-market, architectural and quality considerations, staffing levels...
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