Some years ago, the software industry used the waterfall model to manage the systems development lifecycle (SDLC). The waterfall model includes many phases, such as gathering requirements, designing a solution, writing the code, verifying that the code meets the user requirements, and finally, delivering the product. In order to work on each of these phases, different teams and roles were created, including analysts, developers, software architects, QA teams, operations people, project managers, and so on. Each one of these roles were responsible for producing output and delivering it to the next team.
The steps needed to create a software system using the waterfall model are as follows:
- Analysts gather the software requirements
- Software architects review the requirements carefully and expand the documents with information about the tools and technologies that will be used, modules that have to be written to create the system, diagrams showing how the components are going to be connected in order to work as a whole, and so on
- Developers follow the directions issued by the architects and code the application
- QAs have to validate if the created software works as expected
- The operations team deploys the software
As you might notice from these steps, at each stage, a different team is producing a well-defined output that is delivered to the next team creating a chain. This process perfectly describes how teams work using a silo mentality.
This software production process seems good at first glance. However, this approach has several disadvantages. Firstly, it is impossible to produce perfect output in each phase, and incomplete artifacts are often produced. As a result, teams and departments that are concentrated on their own processes begin to pay less attention to what everyone else in the organization does. If a member of a team feels less responsible for the problems that occur within another team, a wall of conflict arises in this area because each team works separately with several barriers between them, causing issues such as communication breakdowns, thereby disrupting the free and fluent flow of information.