Moving from an unwieldy, bloated software development life cycle to short, bite-sized ones seems to be the first essential step in making the transition to Agile. But this is just the beginning.
One way of looking at our transition was that this first step was a kind of Agile wrapper around a legacy Waterfall process – or to put it another way, “mini-Waterfall”.
What are the characteristics of mini-Waterfall?
– business analysis and requirements are carried out one sprint before the sprint in which the actual work is done
– QA is a separate phase of a sprint following a development phase
– daily stand-ups (if held at all) are tedious status reports
– there is very little collaboration between people carrying out different functions
– communication tends to be digital and deferred rather than face-to-face and immediate
I would say that this is quite a natural phase of transition to go through, but I think it is important to remember that teams should not get stuck at this point.
