In the early days of the web, most companies seeking an online presence typically needed to take a dive off Niagara Falls—in the form of old-fashioned waterfall web design. The cascading approach was often slow, sequential and tedious, requiring every step of the project to be completed separately and individually in a linear, lengthy fashion. Then, in 2001, the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was created, espousing the benefits of an iterative, incremental and agile process. Developers began increasingly adopting an alternative methodology—agile web development—which involves breaking a website project up into smaller chunks that can each be finished and rolled out live one by one instead of waiting until the entire project is completed and releasing it all at once.
Since that time, agile has become the scheme of choice for building software and websites at many companies. Yet, agile hasn’t proven to be a perfect solution. While it offers several advantages over waterfall and other methodologies, it has its limitations, too.
Discover more about these limitations--as well as the myriad benefits of agile web development--by checking out my latest in-depth feature for EContent Magazine, available
here.
