The stages of analysis and design are the main stages in the traditional approaches. Of course the focus of the whole project is there and therefore the effort at these stages is very important. They are methodology-centric – this means that the methodology is very extensive and the right application of the method is a warranty for a successful project.

It’s not far from the truth that the methodology is more important factor than the human factor.

All these traditional approaches are systematic methods of software development where the building phase always follows the stage of design. Most of the important decisions are made during the stage of design and once the product is well designed the project can be continued with the phase of building – which is supposed to be very predictable. Thus the stage of building the product only follows the “perfect” design of the system.

In that scenario we can see two main activities: design, which is highly creative activity, it is difficult to predict and needs high qualification, and build in other hand, which is simple to predict and doesn’t need high qualification [1].

All these facts can be summarized into the following conclusions:

• When building a software product – the stage of building is a small piece of the whole process.
• The stage of “design” remains the main part of the software construction process.
• It is very difficult to plan and predict processes with high level of creativity.

This is why the traditional methodologies of software development are very useful in some and unsuccessful in other types of projects. Because their main feature is the detailed planning and designing phase they are useful when the project is said to be very large and the level of risk is high. Some project that are estimated to last very long is often developed with some traditional methodology [2].

The traditional approaches, in general, can be described by their main features as follows:

1. They are relevant when the project is very large and the building team is also very large and not always geographically collocated;
2. The stage of planning is very detailed;
3. The documentation is very large and describes all the features of the system;
4. They are used for projects where the main requirements are defined early and doesn’t change often;
5. The phases of analysis, planning, design, build and deploy are consecutive;

[1] Fowler M. The New Methodology, 2005
[2] Wysocki R. K., McGary R., Effective Project Management, Third Edition, John Wiley & Sons © 2003