5) Some of the adaptive approaches to developing systems (like agile) are becoming more popular. Are they better or more appropriate than prescriptive approaches in most cases? Why or why not?

Agile – provides for incremental releases in short time frames, and where “requirements cannot be define early” in the planning process. 

Agile might be appropriate for some organizations such as Microsoft that releases a product then provides service packs for reliability and stability updates, but government and financial organizations must have clearly defined requirements, like those provided by the waterfall or spiral life cycle. Prototyping and RAD would be more appropriate where physical products are delivered, like the automotive industry.

Agile definitely can benefit some organizations by prioritizing issues and resolving those critical issues as soon as possible. To me the most important person is the person that sets the priorities, assigns the work and monitors the progress, and keep a happy staff. Agile places an increased burden on those individuals to remain focused and on top of all items and concerns. Many organizations probably do not have “many” of these individuals and the required skill set to implement the Agile process. Those that do would be successful and those that do not would revert back to or stay with the prescriptive  approaches .

Prescriptive approaches – Waterfall, Spiral, Prototyping, Rapid Application Development (RAD)


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