App Planning and Agile/Waterfall Comparison

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Plan and Document

This week I made a detailed requirements document for a rideshare service application similar to Uber. This involved creating a system environment diagram showing the customer app, driver app, and administrator dashboard interacting with a backend server. It also connected to GPS, payments, and notification services. As a former Uber driver (with a 4.99–5.0-star rating—just saying), I particularly enjoyed developing the entity relationship diagram, which required me to think through all the critical details an application like this would need, even though this version was simplified. I also built a UML use case diagram featuring three main actors (Customer, Driver, and Administrator) and outlined use cases like requesting or canceling rides, accepting rides, managing pickups and drop-offs, processing payments, providing ratings, reporting issues, and monitoring overall activity.

Comparing Agile to Waterfall

In past projects, we used Agile process which focuses on iterative development. It has flexibility and adapts to requirements as the project takes form. This allows the team to adjust features and priorities based on testing and client feedback. In contrast, the Plan and Document (AKA Waterfall) process is a little more strict. It gathers all requirements, designing, building, testing, and delivering in different phases of the project. This makes it bit harder to accommodate changes once the plan was set. In my opinion, Agile encourages more collaboration and faster delivery. Waterfall emphasizes more documentation and a well-defined plan before coding begins. 

Reflections

This week was a little intensive even though it didn’t require any code. I gained hands-on knowledge of cloud deployment and got a clearer picture of how careful planning in the requirements phase is to translate to a functional, cloud-deployed system. This felt like real-world, professional-level work.

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