What are the advantages and disadvantages of ssadm?

Answer 1

SSADM has many advantages and disadvantages and in my opinion more of the latter. Advantages: Well documented. Thorough roadmap/guidelines i.e. it's hard to go off-track. High quality system is delivered at the end of the project. Suits hierarchical organisations like government bodies. Developers have more freedom to 'get on with it' than when they have to involve users as in Agile methods. Disadvantages: Long development times as each stage must be completed thoroughly before moving on to the next. This costs time and money so organisations have to have large resources for SSADM projects. Lack of user involvement means the system rarely meets user needs and is less likely to be accepted. Bases success on how closely final system meets original specification. Unfortunately business and user needs change quickly and systems delivered via SSADM are often redundant by the time they are released. As it is not iterative, it is sequential, changes are not easily implemented, so it's not flexible. Too much documentation - time consuming. Overly bureacratic. Not everything needs documenting. This can be a full time job in itself.