Scrum or Waterfall: Which Methodology Best Suits Your Startup?

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Looking to develop a solution for your startup? Which development methodology is best for you – Scrum or Waterfall? Here’s everything to help you out with the right decision!

The most famous of all debates in software development have always been whether to go with the Scrum or the Waterfall approach. Different businesses have different needs and they all want to reach a different set of audiences in different market scenarios. Which makes it even tougher to go with the right choice.

If we talk about startups,in particular,we would find this difference even more prominent. For the matter of fact that they are more amorphous in their appearance and presence as their ideas and events are not comprehensive enough to equip and portray a serious trade profile and character.The reason behind being, most of the startups are built on nascent concepts backed by limited resources and most of the times based on pilot studies and mostly approached in a makeshift experimental basis.

Now, that sets apart a startup from an already running business or a grown-up venture that have their resources and plans in place.

So, the question remains – how does it make a difference for a startup to decide on which methodology to choose.

Again, if we talk broadly (just looking at the orientation or format of the business) we are not going to reach one definite answer. As choosing between Scrum or Waterfall totally depends on the product type, market challenges, timeline preferences, technical complexities and the overall app development plan.

So, let’s take a scenario – you are building an app for tracking meal and want your users to track their food habits and the nutritional intake through it. Now, to make it stand out of the league and to make an inventive attempt around this concept, you are looking to add dynamic features facilitated by advanced functional integration. Here, you want your user to grab the nutritional information of their food through photo analysis and get to compare their food and health patterns with others in their networks through a shared activity matrix. How should it be approached? Let’s take Waterfall and Scrum head-to-head.

Going with Waterfall

In this case, if you are going with waterfall methodology, you must be knowing all the features that you are going to put in and set them in a sequence. Here, you need to draft a complete plan to reach realistic estimation and determine the practicality of the features, both at a relative and an individual capacity. Here you need to consider all the possibilities and odds that could impact factors like user response, industrial legitimacy, value proposition and scalability – before you start rolling out your project plan.

With the waterfall methodology, you are just going to follow a system that involves – feasibility analysis, planning, designing/building the solution, testing, delivering and providing support.

Along the course of development, you need to keep a close watch on standards and take realistic estimates for time and cost creating different checkpoints and trackers (measuring different features, resources and their absolute impacts and relative roles) to assure you are approaching the solution right and as per the strategy conceived initially.

Going with Scrum

With scrum, the whole effort that goes as one big string of development is divided into separate software modules and parted features to be approached through an agile methodology. In the case of the food tracking app, this would cover all basic features in one as part of the phase one development. This would comprise working on one part focusing on tasks that are functionally related and mutually dependent – to accomplish a part of the app that stands complete and deliverable as a Minimum Viable Product.

This would be approached through weekly or fortnightly sprints to attain a certain piece or module of the app, maybe the ‘nutrition calculator module’ in this case. Next thing could be working on the module to allow sharing the food photos with friends. And as all these basic features complete, they can be put together to serve as an MVP for your app. This could be furnished with all the packaging essentials and rolled out as a Beta version. This would allow your startup to have enough idea on how far the app is able to connect with its user base and if it is reflecting/delivering the value that it was initially planned to do.

If you think, this part of your app is doing well with your audiences with Scrum approach you can scale it up with more sophisticated features and build it to deliver advanced health results. Taking this further, you can try integrating it with other similar services and resources that are worth investing in, as you have reached a certain size of offering already and can determine and control what goes well with your startup idea.

Scrum or Waterfall?

No particular method is entirely good or bad. It is just about your preferences and how you look to plan and scale up your project (which also includes what Cost Per Change you measure for the project across different execution points). Here, you should consider all the negative aspects and the favoring possibilities while reaching out the decision on whether to go with Scrum or Waterfall.

Here, one thing to consider above all is, if you are not prepared and sourced to serve your startup idea well, it’s better to take easy steps and iterate and take those efforts to reach smaller sustainable goals. This would allow you more leverage in controlling the risk factor and reach a steady and powerful product that is proven and tested to serve your audiences at all levels. Alternatively, if your idea is to reach a higher value proposition facilitated through a far-scoping product backed by a functionally approved plan, going with waterfall can be in your favor.

Just try to diagnose your development needs and determine the scope of your venture relating it to the factors of approaching the solution – and you will be able to find what works best for your startup – Scrum or Waterfall.

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About Author
Manish Jain

Manish Jain

Manish Jain is the co-founder and Managing Director at Konstant Infosolutions. He is responsible for the overall operations of the company and has played a major role in bringing Konstant up from its humble beginnings and, with his immense energy and drive, transforming it into a globally trusted name in IT solutions.

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