Advantages & Disadvantages of Waterfall SDLC Model
Overview
In this post, let’s understand the Advantages and Disadvantages of Waterfall SDLC Model. Every SDLC model has its own pros and cons. Waterfall Model:
https://www.testingdocs.com/waterfall-model/
To know about SDLC:
https://www.testingdocs.com/software-development-lifecycle-sdlc/
Advantages
Simple
The Waterfall SDLC model is a simple and linear model. It is easy to understand and manage.
Suits Standard Projects
The waterfall model is ideal for standard projects with frozen requirements. Project requirements are well understood and should be fixed.
Easy to execute
Project management is easy because each phase is sequential and visible outputs at each stage.
Disadvantages
Ships only once
There are many disadvantages of this SDLC model. The main disadvantage of the Waterfall is that the customer gets the product at the end of all the phases. This model ships the product only once.
High Risk and Uncertainty
The software product is shipped to end user after all the phases are completed. As we can see that the project risk, project cost and uncertainty increases with time.
Requirements shouldn’t Change
This model is not suited for projects whose requirements are likely to change. Frozen requirements are extremely difficult in real projects.
This model is not suited for time sensitive and critical projects. Projects with no fixed requirements or with changing requirements, innovative and new idea projects.
Less adaptive
The waterfall model cannot adapt to any changes to the artifacts. If a customer sends requirements in between, then the whole process should start from the first phase. It leads to higher costs and time consuming process.
Idle Resources
Resources would be idle in this model. For Example, QA Team would be idle during the coding phase and the support team would be idle until the maintenance phase.
Each phase starts after the completion of the earlier phase. For example, testing only starts after the completion of the coding phase. We cannot move to the next phase until the previous stage is completed.
Any change needs a formal process of getting the modification approved which takes a lot of time.