3.

Waterfall- Scrum hybrid

Monday, February 12, 2018 3:05 PM

Water scrum fall or scrummer fall or Water scrum

Agile is popular but not pure

• Constraint by organization culture and intuitive governance
○ Water Scrum Fall is used in two cases in organizations
i. Fit for purpose: In some organization some projects are bound by compliances and governance rules that requires documentation. For this
purpose, one can go for Water Scrum Fall, which focuses on documentation as well as being an agile methodology
ii. Transitioning to Agile: when organizations are in transition from waterfall to agile, there is a chance to have a lot of resistance from the
management. In this case, one can take the water scrum fall approach initially and can work towards becoming agile completely later.

• Team embraces the idea behind agile but fall short of vision
○ Business analysts often become product owners
○ Each team's member work on more than one project
○ Not everything is done in sprint
○ A project culture causes teams to lose momentum
• Traditional processes create inertia (Planning/budgeting/architecture/requirement processes)
○ Plans drive funding
○ Different people do architecture and design
○ The SDLC and governance enforce the creation of a set of documents
○ Development is not involved in the requirements process
• Release organizations resist releasing software
○ Legacy systems are too complex
○ Operations and release groups are bottleneck
○ Infrequent releases are the cultural norm
○ The business doesn't like change
Water-Scrum-Fall
Water scrum fall or scrummer fall or Water scrum is a hybrid methodology which combines documentation centric approach of waterfall with iterative
and incremental product development approach of SCRUM.
• Business analysis and release management continue to follow more-traditional approaches and Scrum adoption is limited to the development-team
level..
○ Compliance requirements another factor for driving hybrid approaches, as strong governance processes needed before and after development.
• From a process perspective, Water Scrum Fall includes three phases
○ Detailed planning and design upfront (The water part)
○ Incremental and Iterative development based on SCRUM
○ Strict and managed delivery of service or product (The fall part)

Water defines the upfront work

The problem of no documentation is solved by the water part in the water scrum fall, in which we gather requirements like Waterfall initially.
In many organizations, governance rules dictate a bit of planning to define requirements and plans. These plans form a contract between the business and
IT, that defines Project direction, budget, and timeline. As a part of this planning and defining requirements upfront we have some hybrid documents like:
• Release planning document: It provides a high-level overview of all the requirements that needed to be implemented in the current release and a high-
level overview of the plan on how to deliver these requirements.
• Predefined release schedule: This is another hybrid process element which provides high level information of entire release plan for the project.
• Product backlog: A detailed requirements document according the IEEE 830 standards for requirement specification.

Be careful spending too much time upfront because

○ Too many early requirements are too many wrong requirements
○ Users don’t always communicate effectively what they want

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 ○ Users don’t always communicate effectively what they want
○ The team takes less ownership of the outcome
○ The development team is less cross-functional

Teams use Scrum to develop software in the middle of the process

In this methodology the development is done following the SCRUM approach. It is iterative and incremental in regular sprints. The roles are similar to
that of SCRUM, you have a PO, Dev. Team, and Scrum master. Sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review and Sprint retro are conducted similarly as in
SCRUM and you can have a regular cadence. In this methodology teams are cross functional, and testing is included within the sprint.
In Water scrum fall you have a review artifact after the sprint review to capture the feedback of customers and to implement them clearly.
In this hybrid approach we accept that change can happen. Water scrum fall defines overall direction of the project, but team will have many ideas during
execution that will challenge initial ideas. Supporting team in implementing change and making them understand the impact of that change will help them
in understanding process for future implementations.

○ Build a cross-functional team

○ Include testing within the sprint
○ Engage with the business
○ Accept that change can happen

Fall means establishing gates to limit software release frequency

○ Bringing operations and development into a closer working partnership
○ Examining and removing release bottlenecks
○ Adding more release activities to the sprints
○ Building shared objectives driven by the business

Fall part in Water Scrum Fall means you establish gates to limit release frequency. It is good to release frequently and get early feedback from the
customer. But in case of complex projects, because of the complex nature of the architecture it is not possible to release frequently. Hence in this
stage we plan for releases with a focus on system testing and user acceptance testing before deploying the solution to the customer.
Some process elements are
Requirements traceability matrix: This document keeps track of the requirements and respective test cases to ensure all the functionalities are tested.

Recommendations
○ Push back on the water-scrum side of the model
○ Ensure that they built a truly agile team for the middle of the process
○ Increase the frequency of the release to production

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