Spiral Model
What is the Spiral Model?
When building a giant tower of blocks, you don’t stack them all at once. You start by building a small tower first, then make it more significant and prominent in rounds, each time adding more blocks. That’s like how the Spiral Model creates software like a computer game or tool. The Spiral Model is like a playtime routine for building software. Like our block tower, it has several steps or “rounds” of play. Here they are:
- Planning: This is like thinking about what kind of tower you want to build. In software, it’s about what kind of tool or game they want to create.
- Risk Analysis: Imagine if you’re building a tower and it might fall over. You’d think about why it might fall over and how you can stop that from happening, right? That’s what this step is about but for the software.
- Engineering/Building: When you ask for the blocks (or building the software).
- Evaluation: Once you’ve built some of the towers, you should step back and look at them to ensure it’s okay. That’s what this step is about.
After these steps, you go back to step one and start over, adding more to the software each time, just like adding more blocks to the tower. You do this repeatedly, making the software better each time until you’re happy with what you’ve built.
Benefits and Downsides of the Spiral Model
Benefits
- It’s suitable for big projects: If you’re building a massive tower, you would want to build it only some at a time. The same goes for software. The Spiral Model helps break it down into smaller parts if it’s a big project.
- It helps with risks: By constantly thinking about what could go wrong (like the tower falling over), you can plan to avoid those things.
Downsides
- It can take a long time: Just like building a massive tower of blocks can take a long time, the Spiral Model can also take a long time for big software projects.
- It can be expensive: If you needed to buy lots of blocks to build your tower, it would cost a lot of money. The same is valid for software. Since the Spiral Model is for big projects, it can cost much money.
Further Reading
If you or your parents want to learn more about the Spiral Model, check out these resources: