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A year back I was involved in visiting a few vendors for web application development in New Zealand and India. It was weird when vendors spoke about their development methodology and why one is better than the other. I asked myself and a few of my guru friends the same question whether it mattered if it was Agile or Waterfall methodology?

The simple answer is NO it does not. But with every opinion there are numerous BUT’s, Read on to make your own decision.

To get an Overview of Agile Methodology and Waterfall Methodology you could read about this here
In the software / web development world, there has been till date debates about which methodology is the best. Should we go the Agile track or should it be Waterfall. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. In some projects I would say its better to go the Agile way and in some projects the waterfall. When there are many cooks trying to cook up a recipe the notion is a debate Agile works better for smaller projects and Waterfall works better for more complex projects but after the vendor presentation that I was present at, i have come to the conclusion that given the right team and organizational setup both these methodologies can be used on either small or big complex projects.

Some will argue that to manage more than 3 programmers Agile doesn’t scale well, but my perception is that you need to understand how Agile has been used in the organization in the past. The methodology has nothing to do with the project having 3 or 40 programmers. Its about how do you implement a methodology and how well is the methodology being followed.

Others will argue that the ‘waterfall’ method fails for smaller projects as smaller projects require more flexibility to development. Again, it may not be the waterfall method but the way in which the organization approaches the project that causes the failure.

My personal experience in managing web development shows that Agile works very well in small projects that require fast development. I truly believe that an organization can choose whatever methodology they want to manage a project, but without proper alignment of a team, the project most likely will not succeed. Add to that the political movements within teams and there goes any methodology out the window. Rather than focusing on a methodology it is key to understand the people on the project.

Processes are successful when you have people who are willing to work with the process. If a process sucks change it. If you hate waking up in the morning but prefer to work late nights as a developer does it hurt to have the developers walk into work at 9:30 than the norm of being at work at 8 or 8:30. An organization that chooses the right people for the job and helping the people on the project succeed, can implement any project management methodology and they will be successful.