Software development models-Waterfall Model

Making something can be thought of as a linear sequence of events. You start at A, you do B and then go to C and eventually end up at Z. This is extremely simplistic but it does allow you to visualise the series of events in the simplest way and it emphasises the importance of delivery withsteps being taken towards a conclusion. Below is the “Waterfall Model” which shows typical development tasks flowing into each other.Early in the history of software development it was adapted from engineering models to be a blueprint for software development.

The flow is



The five steps outlined are :
• Analyse the requirements of the project and decide what it is supposed to do
• Design a solution to meet these requirements
• Implement the design into a working product
• Verify the finished product against the design (and requirements)
• Maintain the project as necessary

The Waterfall Model was widely adopted in the early days of software development and a lot of blame has been laid at its door.

Critics argue that many problems in software development stem from this model. Early
development projects that followed this model ran over budget and over schedule and the blame was attributed to the linear, step-wise nature of the model.
It is very rare that requirements analysis can be entirely completed before design and design before development and so on. It is far more likely that each phase will have interaction with each of the other phases.

In a small project this is not a problem since the span from “analyse” to “implement” may be a period of weeks or even days. For a large scale project which span months or even years the gap becomes significant. The more time that passes between analysis and implementation, the more a gap exists between the delivered project and the requirements of end-users. Think about a finance system which is ‘analysed’ one year, designed the next year and developed and implemented the following year.

That’s three years between the point at which the
requirements are captured and the system actually reaches its end users. In three years its likely that the business, if not the whole industry, will have moved considerably and the requirements willno longer be valid. The developers will be developing the wrong system! Software of this scale isnot uncommon either.

A definition of requirements may be accurate at the time of capture but decays with frightening speed. In the modern business world, the chance of your requirements analysis being valid a couple of months after it has been conducted is very slim indeed. Other versions of the waterfall model have been developed to alleviate this. One, the Iterative Waterfall Model, includes a loop as shown below.
This model attempts to overcome the limitations of the original model by adding an “iterative”loop to the end of the cycle. That is, in order to keep up with changing requirements the “analysis”phase is revisited at the end of the cycle and the process starts over again.



This alleviates the situation somewhat but still introduces a considerable lag between analysis andimplementation. The waterfall model implies you have to complete all the steps before you start the process again. If requirements change during the life of the project the waterfall model requires the completion of a full cycle before they can be revisited.