A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, project management was in its infancy.
The popular methodology at the time was called “waterfall”, which visually symbolized various stages: sales, discovery, design, build, test, deploy. The subsequent stage was started only once the previous stage was completed.
This means you complete the entire design stage before building. And once you start building, you don’t return to the design stage. So design flaws are only caught during the test stage.
Today, and for the last dozen or so years, nearly all Salesforce projects implement the agile methodology, or a hybrid between waterfall and agile.
The agile method allows for shorter stages with iterations. A feature is designed, it’s built, promoted to UAT or production, and then another feature is designed.
The hybrid approach might design multiple features in advance, and iterate some of the details. It also might only promote development to UAT, and deploy to production in larger releases.
Agile and/or hybrid are clearly superior for many reasons
- Users get to benefit from features faster
- You don’t have overwhelming huge releases
- You don’t need to plan virtually everything in advance and hope nothing changes during the build phase
Why am I telling you all this? I was recently approached by a client that is forcing their vendors to use the waterfall method. There was no room for negotiation.
The takeaway
Be happy we work with agile or hybrid these days. It’s better than the old days.