Use of waterfall v.

agile methods at Mellon Financial

Mellon Financial’s shift to agile software development is part of an emerging trend. ‘Every investment bank
and hedge fund I’ve spoken to is looking at agile’, says Sungard’s Chapman. A relatively new term, agile
development is based on iterative development – developing software in small, manageable chunks that can
be modified as requirements change, yet using a disciplined software delivery mechanism.
Historically, the software development approach used throughout Wall Street has been the ‘waterfall’
method, which calls for strict, lengthy analysis and documentation of requirements. For a one-year project,
for example, three to six months might be spent on needs analysis. ‘The business people are expected to define
100 percent of their requirements up front before the project even starts’, Chapman says. ‘People get stuck in
this analysis paralysis – they spend months and months trying to define what they want.’
Another three to six months can be devoted to soft-ware design, then the actual program finally is
written. ‘Inevitably what happens is requirements change, integration becomes very difficult and all the risky
software development happens at the end of the development effort’, Chapman explains. ‘The waterfall
approach has a horrible track record of delivery.’
Agile software development is designed to deliver software more quickly yet maintain high quality. In
agile methods, every two or four weeks, businesspeople get a small amount of code to review and the
opportunity to change the requirements. ‘Imagine a hedge fund where traditionally a new credit derivatives
trading system would take a year to build using the waterfall approach, with businesspeople writing six
months’ worth of documentation versus using an agile approach, where some of the system is delivered in
two weeks, and it’s OK if you change your mind’, Chapman says. ‘For the hedge funds particularly, agile is
an extraordinarily good fit because the portfolio managers want to get things done quickly.’
But not every project lends itself to short iterations, Chapman concedes. ‘On Wall Street it’s not so
easy because there are a lot of other systems you need to integrate with’, he says. ‘But I think there are parts
of agile you can use on every project to improve it.’
Agile development has three levels: developer, project and enterprise. ‘Nobody on Wall Street is using
agile at the enterprise level’, Chapman says. ‘A lot of education needs to take place within the banks – it’s
going to take some time. But I think every project could gain some benefit from trying to break down the
project into more-manageable chunks that can be delivered in a more iterative and agile way.’
Agile methods even improve software quality, Chapman contends, because they emphasize testing.
Agile methods encourage developers to do their own testing, often requiring
them to write the tests before they write any code and to develop automated testing routines for the programs
they deliver.
‘Agile development approaches and CMMI are compliant with each other – you can use CMM and
CMMI to make agile software development better’, Chapman adds. On the other hand, he asserts, trying to
use CMM and CMMI on top of waterfall development approaches will just weigh projects down with
bureaucracy and paperwork.
Source:
www.wallstreetandtech.com/advancedtrading/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199601961&cid
=RSSfeed_TechWeb
accessed via www.computing.co.uk
Questions:
1. What does the observation that ‘requirements change, integration becomes very difficult and all the risky
software development happens at the end of the development effort’ suggest about the traditional waterfall
approach to software development with respect to system design?
2. Do you think there are any dangers in trying to take short cuts around the traditional approach to systems
design?