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I believe that Agile is nothing but another implementation of Spiral Model. I am a big supporter of Spiral (The spiral model is a software development process combining elements of both design and prototyping-in-stages, in an effort to combine advantages of top-down and bottom-up concepts) since its beginnings and have seen that lot of projects implement Spiral without knowing that they are operating in a Spiral world. Since the day Agile started gaining popularity the concept of spiral started getting overlooked a little bit. I am sure that for complex projects spiral is still the best alternative but I would like to get a better understanding of the similarities and differences between Agile and Spiral techniques. Can anyone explain their differences/similarities?
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Agile model Vs Spiral model: The Agile model focuses on the delivery of an increment to the customer after each Time-box, so customer interaction is more frequent. The spiral model mainly deals with various kinds of unanticipated risks but customer interaction is less.
The Agile SDLC development method focuses on collaborative decision-making, customer satisfaction, and development over multiple short cycles or sprints, rather than a top-down process with a single series of stages.
SDLC provides a systematic approach to building software towards successful product deliverables within the timelines, whereas Agile has faster development approach and speeds up the development process in an effective and efficient manner.
01. Agile is a methodology following an iterative approach used for project management purposes. SDLC is a process of design and development of a product or service.
Agile is spiral. Totally. In part, the name was changed for marketing purposes.
The problem is that spiral tends to imply "big design up front" -- where you plan out many spirals, each in order of risk. Spiral, however, isn't Agile -- it's just incremental execution in order of risk.
One big distinction that Agile adds is the "don't overplan things you can't know yet." Agile is spiral, but you create detailed plans for just one increment at a time.
Agile adds a lot of other things, also. Spiral is a very technical approach. Agile, however, recognizes that technology is built by people. The Agile Manifesto has four principles that are above and beyond the Boehm's simple risk management approach.
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The basic difference, as I see it, is that most Spiral models of development still insist on big, up-front design. The emphasis is on knowing as much as you can about how the system will be used; discovering all the use cases. Once you know these, then you design the system and break it down into phases that follow an iterative detail-design, implementation, test, refactor-design loop. In Agile, their is some up-front planning -- perhaps gathering large grain understanding (story titles) -- so that reasonable releases can be described, but each release is planned independently and we delay discovery of the details until we are ready to begin implementation of that release. We expect change and don't try to know everything first.
Another thing that differs is that most Agile philosophies involve "test-first" methods. This is different from spiral where testing is often an activity unto itself and tests are not developed prior to code. Most often they are planned in advance, but developed in parallel or after coding. Many agile methods insist on developing tests first as the specification for the code.
They are similar in that they are iterative. They differ in the implementation and understanding of what an iteration is.
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