Agile and Spiral Software Development

Agile methodology is a software development model that encourages the continuous iteration of development and testing in the entire software development lifecycle of the project. Here we will discuss more on the software development models and approaches, how Agile overcomes the issues of other approaches, and Practical implementation of the agile model into the project.

The spiral model is similar to the incremental model, with more emphasis placed on risk analysis. The spiral model has four phases: Planning, Risk Analysis, Engineering, and Evaluation. A software project repeatedly passes through these phases in iterations (called Spirals in this model). The baseline spiral, starting in the planning phase, requirements are gathered and risk is assessed. Each subsequent spiral builds on the baseline spiral.

Agile Vs Spiral

The main principle of the agile model is to achieve agility by removing unnecessary activities that waste time and effort. The Agile model focuses on the delivery of an increment to the customer after each Time-box, so customer interaction is more frequent. Agile model is suitable for large projects that are easy to divide into small parts that can be easily developed incrementally over each iteration. Agile model does not rely on documentation.

The main principle of the Spiral model is risk handling. Spiral model mainly deals with various kinds of unanticipated risks but customer interaction is less. The Spiral model is suitable for those projects that are prone to various kinds of risks that are difficult to anticipate at the beginning of the project. Proper documentation is required for Spiral model.

The agile methodology is also a software development methodology that came in 2001 when the agile manifesto was introduced. It employs four values and twelve principals that help build an “agile” software development culture. Generally speaking, agile encourages adoption and a leadership mindset that promotes teamwork, self-organization, and accountability. More importantly, the agile approach focuses more on continuously aligning development with customer needs and trends — even when those needs and trends change late in the development process.

Spiral Model is a risk-driven software development process model. It is a combination of waterfall model and iterative model. Spiral Model helps to adopt software development elements of multiple process models for the software project based on unique risk patterns ensuring efficient development process. Spiral Model is called meta-model because it uses both Waterfall and Prototype models. But it’s highly important to understand that Spiral Model is not just a sequence of waterfall increments.