Monday, June 1, 2009

Scrum for Waterfall

Many Software Product Development Organizations working in a traditional plan-driven and process-driven environment are not able to apply Scrum in its right spirit.

Scrum is an adaptive management framework that is used only in iterative development, in the face of volatile and evolving requirements accompanied by high degree of unpredictabilities in the development scenario.

It is based on an empirical process approach that helps empowered self-organizing cross-functional teams "inspect and adapt" to fast changing situations in the development environments, achieved through a high degree of collaboration with their customers. Trust and Tansparency is an imperative in Scrum environments.

If Scrum is applied in a predictive, traditional management structure, it becomes counter-productive. Many times, when Scrum is implemented upside down in such contexts it causes such projects to move from "frying pan to fire". This is referred to as "Flaccid Scrum" or in Ken Schwaber's own term "ScrumBut".

On this blog-site we are trying to evolve a set of practices that can help deliver "Waterfall Organizations" similar kind of benefits that Agile organizations reap from methodologies like Scrum.

We wish to evolve a new variant of Scrum for the "waterfall" organization by drawing upon from the best of the paradigms in Agile, Lean, Six-sigma, TOC/CCPM and the likes, as appropriate, practical and feasible for such organizations using watefall as their main software product development approach.

We like to call this FScrum to mean, "Scrum for Waterfall"

1 comment:

  1. just linked this article on my facebook account. it’s a very interesting article for all.



    Scrum Process

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