Learning from your own experiences is priceless. We’ve all made our share of blunders, myself included. While sharing tales of our missteps might provide some comic relief, the real value lies in the lessons learned. You don’t forget a mistake when you’ve had to deal with its consequences.

Speaking from firsthand observation, it’s not uncommon for developers to roll out code live, often hastily, to meet pressing business deadlines. The urgency tends to outweigh any considerations for the potential havoc it could wreak on a production environment. These situations occur more often than you might think.

You can manage scopes of time, cost, and quality much more effectively by basing your decisions on working software with actual feedback and metrics, not just task items on a project schedule.

The team’s development process defines who is doing what, when, and how.
In the waterfall model, software activities proceed through a sequence of steps, with each step based on the activities of the previous step.
The spiral model begins with a series of risk-driven prototypes, followed by a structured waterfall-like process.
The iterative approach, a hybrid of the waterfall and spiral models, decouples the lifecycle phases from the software activities that take place in each phase.
No matter what model you use, you must develop at least one early prototype to get customer feedback.