Implementing IT solution with waterfall - my personal example

This time I would like to provide an example of one IT project and how choosing wrong project management type can make everything overcomplicated. The example which I am going to provide took place in production factory where I was responsible for logistics. The story was simple - factory had its own applications developed by its software developers long time ago for their needs. However, there were several problems - the application was written using outdated technologies and there was only one software developer left who could maintain those programs. Overall company decided they should not have their own software and switch to some standard ERP solution.

As a factory had its project managers and widely followed waterfall approach, they decided to continue using that approach on this project as well. There was no need to make a lot of development per se, as the company decided to use one of standard ERP solutions, mostly some modifications which seemed simple enough. The idea was to write specification, then make modifications in the application for the needs of production, testing, deployment and maintenance. One big step added to this model was tutoring, as there were a lot of workers depending on the program.

The chosen approach was not the best - by the time I came to a company, the whole process has already been around for five years, but was still on step one - writing a documentation. The goal was to write documentation for the whole system including marketing, supply chain, transport, accounting, budget-planning and a lot of more. So the company wanted to finish writing a documentation for everything and then start development and implementing. Within 5 years no major steps had been done - documentation was still not full and some part of it required an update. Then a proper solution was made - to take a more agile approach and divide the whole solution into smaller modules and take them one by one. Within a year new documentation was created and 2 big modules already were working - marketing and financial.

Problems with waterfall[1]

I made a conclusion to myself, that although waterfall was a good method for production, it does not suit all the situations. Sometimes more agile and flexible approach is needed. It does not mean waterfall is a bad management strategy in IT as well, it just means that it suits not every project out there.

1. https://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/agile-vs-waterfall/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One of Virginia Shea's 10 Rules for Netiquette (and my own observation)

Image
 This is my personal example of my observation of Virginia Shea's 10 rules in action. I am going to talk about examples in gaming/streaming industry. Currently I am not a gamer anymore, but several years ago I was actively playing videogames as well as watching streams. The games I was playing included League of Legends, Hearthstone, Call of Duty, CS and some more and I watched gamers streaming them. Watching game streams led me to a conclusion, that there are basically two main behaviors of streamers - either they are polite and respectful or totally unbearable from a social perspective. It was hard to find somebody somewhere in the middle. When I found about Virginia Shea's 10 rules for netiquette, I noticed that first ones generally follow all the 10 rules, whereas second  often break all of them - they swear, ignore other players privacy and bring negative to game. But I will focus on one rule and try to explain how those who follow the netiquette and those who don't ...
Read more

Wikipage article review - Low-code and no-code programming

Today I would like to give my opinion about a wiki article written by my fellow students about no-code and low-code programming. The article can be found under this link: https://wiki.itcollege.ee/index.php/Low-code_ja_no-code_programmeerimine To start, I would like to briefly tell why I chose this article to give my assessment. Although I have been working in IT for some time, I have never heard about these concepts and their use. I even mistakenly thought that low-code programming had something to do with low level programming. So it was very interesting and educative for me to read about these topics. What I liked in a introduction part, is the fact that in this article probable Estonian names for these concepts were given. In my opinion it is a nice habit for native speakers to have local naming for words as an alternative to English terms, this is why it could actually be a good idea to actually post this article on Wikipedia, so that these terms could be populated before these co...
Read more

Supporting solution which I discovered for myself lately

Image
I would like to share about one supporting solution in Microsoft Windows, which I started to use recently. The solution itself is pretty simple and many know about it. On the other hand it turned out that actually there are also so many people who do not know about it and discovering it could greatly help them. It is called a copy clipboard. The idea is very simple - when one wants needs to copy a data (text, pictures) from one place to another they usually select the data which you want to copy then paste it. And the process is repeated several times until all data is copied. Taking use of clipboard solves this problem - you can select any amount data you want to copy and then paste it accordingly. This could be especially needed when you have only one monitor or use a laptop as in this case switching between apps might be too much and separating a screen vertically might not be very convenient. But this supporting solution also has one negative point - it stores everything and user h...
Read more