How we build innovative solutions
Software development is a complex endeavor, one that has multiple moving parts. Dealing with all the factors that might affect a particular software development project can be tricky, mainly because there are numerous ways in which you can tackle it. Each of these ways constitutes a software development methodology.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all methodology that can get to grips with all kinds of projects. Depending on the software you’re working on, you may find that a particular methodology is better than the others. But how can you know for sure? That’s why we made this list of the development methodologies we use at Sprint Mode Studios — to provide you with a glimpse into these methods through the eyes of our expertise.
We power the world's most ambitious companies
What is a software development methodology?
Software development methodologies aim to provide a clear, optimized, and effective roadmap for building software. Thus, a software development methodology is a process or series of processes that leverages a particular approach and different techniques to help with development.
Each available methodology today does all of the above in different ways. Each of them has its own pros and cons, so picking the right one for a particular project calls for a profound understanding of how they work and what they can provide.
Types of Software Development Methodologies
Choosing the right software development methodology for your project requires you to analyze the project’s characteristics, requirements, objectives, features, scope, available budget, resources, and schedule. Once you have all that information, and knowing what each methodology can provide, you can pick the one that’s best suited to you.
Agile
Agile is the most popular software development methodology today. Breaking away from the linear model that came before it, Agile uses an iterative approach to project management. In other words, it divides all tasks into short sprints that take between one and four weeks to finish. These sprints allow the team to focus on incremental development, which means that the product gets better and more robust with each passing iteration.
Agile is the best choice for:
Scrum
Scrum is an Agile-inspired methodology that uses an incremental and iterative approach to software development, making it a highly flexible method. There are three key roles in Scrum:
- Product Owner — Understands the stakeholders’ vision for the product and makes sure that the team is working towards fulfilling it.
- Scrum Master — Facilitates the Scrum process, making sure that the team knows and leverages the process itself.
- Development Team — Executes the development process taking the Product Owner’s and the Scrum Master’s feedback into account.
As in Agile, tasks are divided into sprints that allow the development team to quickly work on incremental solutions while testing them and getting feedback at the same time.
Scrum is the best choice for:
Waterfall
Waterfall is a traditional development methodology that’s been around for decades. It uses a linear approach where each stage is part of a sequence. Thus, the process only moves forward with a new stage after the preceding stage is completed. It’s a highly structured methodology in which the steps follow one another in a cascading fashion and always in one direction (meaning that you won't be able to go back after a specific phase of the development lifecycle is completed).
Waterfall is the best choice for:
Lean
Lean is a methodology that comes straight out of the manufacturing process in the automotive industry, most precisely from Toyota. The company developed the following lean manufacturing principles to improve its processes:
- Eliminate waste by avoiding tasks that don’t add value to the final product.
- Focus on quality by preventing issues from snowballing.
- Learn from past work by analyzing how the tasks and their results turned out.
- Keep flexibility up by delaying irreversible decisions as much as possible.
- Deliver quickly by focusing solely on the important features for any given iteration.
- Trust the team’s expertise by avoiding micromanagement.
- Think about the quality of the entire product by understanding how each new step contributes to it.
By following these principles, developers can better collaborate with each other, focusing on the task at hand but always safeguarding the quality of the final product.
Lean is the best choice for:
Prototype
As its name indicates, Prototype is a methodology aimed at developing basic versions of a final product. The process in this methodology is fairly straightforward: the team gathers the requirements, makes a design, and builds a basic prototype, which the stakeholders then test and evaluate to provide feedback. The prototype methodology also uses an iterative process to refine the product until it meets the initial requirements.
Prototype is the best choice for:
Rapid Application Development
Rapid Application Development (RAD) is a methodology that focuses on development speed. Its main goal is to get to the final product as fast as possible but without sacrificing quality along the way. To do so, RAD uses a 4-step process (requirement definition, prototyping, testing, and implementation) that iterates over and over until the product is done. RAD concentrates on creating prototypes which are then intensively tested to get precise and detailed feedback. That feedback is then used to build a superior prototype that goes through the same process until it reaches its final form.
RAD is the best choice for:
XP - Extreme Programming
Extreme Programming is a development methodology that focuses on building higher quality software while also trying to improve the working environment for developers and the satisfaction of all stakeholders. This methodology empowers developers and provides them with the ability to self-organize around a particular issue to solve it as efficiently as possible. Its approach to development relies on 12 principles which guide the whole process and which can be boiled down to five crucial aspects:
- Constant communication among developers
- Simplicity of design
- Detailed feedback from stakeholders since day one
- Respect for the work of other team members
- Courage to respond to changing requirements and technologies
To honor those principles, development teams use a series of practices, such as pair programming, weekly and quarterly cycles, and incremental design.
XP is the best choice for:
We Are Experts in Development Methodologies
At Sprint Mode Studios, we have an in-depth understanding of all development methodologies. Thanks to our years of cross-industry experience, we know which methodology is best for each project and we know how to leverage them for success. It doesn’t matter which software project you’re about to embark on: we can help you take it to the next level.