Agile: Advantages and Disadvantages

In my previous posts, I started and talked about Agile philosophy and Agile Project Management.

In this post, we will briefly go through all the advantages and disadvantages of the Agile model.

Before we do that, let’s shortly recap, what is Agile.

Recap

Agile is a time-boxed, iterative software development approach that builds software incrementally from the very beginning and it delivers that into small pieces (Iterations/Sprints) instead of everything at once.

When we all know what is Agile, let’s dive deep into Agile advantages and disadvantages.

The advantages of the Agile model are:

• A very realistic approach to software development.
• Promotes teamwork and cross-training.
• Functionality can be developed rapidly and demonstrated.
• Resource requirements are minimum.
• Suitable for fixed or changing requirements
• Delivers early partial working solutions.
• A good model for environments that change steadily.
• Minimal rules, documentation easily employed.
• Enables concurrent development and delivery within an overall planned context.
• Little or no planning is required.
• Easy to manage.
• Gives flexibility to developers.

The disadvantages of the Agile Model are:

• Not suitable for handling complex dependencies.
• More risk of sustainability, maintainability, and extensibility.
• An overall plan, an agile leader, and agile PM practice is a must without which it will not work.
• Strict delivery management dictates the scope, functionality to be delivered, and adjustments to meet the deadlines.
• Depends heavily on customer interaction, so if the customer is not clear, the team can be driven in the wrong direction.
• There is a very high individual dependency since there is minimum documentation generated.
• Transfer of technology to new team members may be quite challenging due to a lack of documentation.

Hopefully, this post will help many of you to understand the advantages and disadvantages of this model.