What are the flaws in water fall model and how to overcome it?

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chaitanya

  • Sep 30th, 2005
 

Water fall Model is mostly suited for small projects since it involves single stage of testing. The major drawback is release date of the application used to slip.

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Madhumathi

  • Oct 10th, 2005
 

Since testing comes at the last stage , there are huge chances of defect multiplication, defects will be migrated to every stage

wastage of human resuources and time delays are also introduced

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pradeep

  • Feb 7th, 2006
 

What are the ways to overcome the difficulties in  waterfall model.What abt the soultion for that.Is it V model?

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Annu

  • Apr 2nd, 2007
 

In waterfall model there is no User Documentation or feedback for each face which is one of the important disadvantage. To over come this we use V-model for testing.

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billyin

  • Jan 17th, 2008
 

-A major drawback to the waterfall model is that the testing stage comes very
late in the development cycle. Though the rigorous specification should make
testing easier and make application less error prone, a single serious error
that’s spotted this late in the development cycle may be particularly costly to
fix


-In addition, the model is poorly suited to adapt to rapidly changing
technology


-Using iterative model can overcome it

StevenPace

  • Jul 12th, 2008
 

The waterfall method does not preclude unit testing, or testing of the interfaces between the units.   In theory, a waterrfall method is fine, but in practice, it is not practical for a commercial product because it is too slow.  Of aspects of the product developement have to occur at the same time, otherwise the competition will get to market before you do, or your product will not have the features that it needs to be competative. 

My suggestion
At early stages, the test team can work on test plans, as the project matures, test plans tend to get more specific, and the emphasis shifts to writing test cases.  As the product matures, more and more aspects of the product have to be "frozen", GUI freeze, etc.
Freeze is not an absolute, some changes have to be made after a freeze, and changes have to be restricted as the freeze approaches, but discipline is essential.  Late changes are VERY dangerous, even serious bugs have to be left alone near the end of the cycle.  That is what patches are for.  Document the bugs, and continue testing. 

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priyadesi

  • May 13th, 2009
 

Waterfall as the name implies does software development from start to finish in an organized path. If the design specs are accurate, and there are not many changes to the project from start to finish then a process can be described, scaled and measured with consistency. Testing at the unit and functional level may or may not be available at each step which often leads "waterfall" to the "big bang" implementation..all in one step.

Waterfall might have efficiency over Agile techniques (usually iterative) in very stable environments. But, specs are often incomplete, misunderstood, and changed throughout the development process. The disadvantage of the waterfall methods are they are not as flexible when it comes to change. One big assumption has always been that customer and end user can define their specs (or an expert for them), but often when they see the product they immediately want this change and that change. Often, Agile techniques get a "walking skeleton" in the end user's hands as soon as possible to get feedback.
Though apparently slower to due multiple iterations changes done earlier in the development process are much easier to do than modifying a finished product which was often the case in waterfall processes.
Finally, today many projects are based on composite software from many sources which are also changing. This is tougher to deal with in a structured environment with a single source of project software. Iterations and testing become key.

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renu2008

  • Jul 22nd, 2009
 

It is difficult to deal with the changes in requirement in this model 

The testing comes as a last phase and if the bug found is in design document so it comes in notice at very late stage of project.

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