Can it possible to even think of the idea that Waterfall and SCRUM can me combined? Well, I was talking to a CTO of an established company, 350 employees, 70 million dollar run rate-- they have over 100 engineers and established product and they just moved to SCRUM about a year ago. It was an interesting conversation and I would love to get opinions on this as I have some of my own.
Here are some snippets from the conversation...
- Waterfall is a great way to communicate releases and dates
- Scrum can do the same but its a continuous process with no seeming end-date ( at least thats how some people perceive it)
- Execs are used to Waterfall where concepts of GA releases have a ship date
In a recent project at Oracle I was able to use the strengths of both approaches in helping deliver software. I am curious if there are others sharing similar or different thoughts on this. One could argue that if we needed both then perhaps SCRUM wasn't followed that strictly since one can group stories and backlog items into a release.
comments welcome..
SCRUM/Agile based development. Transforming the way you work to get projects done.
The latest version of Acrobat (X) used an hybrid Agile / Waterfall model because they had a hard deadline and a large team (not all the teams were agile). It worked quite well. The iterations / demos are really the killer feature of scrum I think, it's harder to bullshit with a running product than with a powerpoint presentation of something you might never be able to build (or could build but miss the point).
ReplyDeleteNot related: you should check-out Getting Real, an awesome book on software dev (web) from the creators of Basecamp and Ruby on Rails.
http://gettingreal.37signals.com/
ps: Cool blog. I've linked it on mine ;) http://blog.jeanserge.com/code/scrum.html