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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.

It’s the day before the release.  All us developers are working like crazy to get everything done in time for the release tomorrow.  We have hit several problems.  We are having cross-browser compatibility problems.  We are having trouble with a bit of Ajax.  The test team have found a bizarre edge-case bug that only a tester would find.  The afternoon is fast becoming evening.  The rest of the office is going home.  We are getting frustrated and tired.  Eventually we have to tell the PM that we aren’t going to make it.

The PM manages to postpone the release by three days.  Phew!  This will give us time to actually put in some solid fixes, rather than band aiding and hacking our way out of a corner.  As news of the release being postponed spreads around the company, the BA pricks up his ears – ah, wait a minute!  If we are postponing by three days, why not postpone by a week, that way we can get in another couple of tasks.  As developers, our hearts sink- just when we thought we would have some decent time to focus, the goal posts have moved.  We would rather get this out the door first then concentrate on those new features, we protest.  No, but this will save on a test cycle, replies the BA.  We’d be crazy to release this stuff then go round the whole cycle again.

Needless to say, we went round another kind of cycle, that of trying to do too much in too little time, attention dispersed and shortcuts taken, bugs created and a business thinking that it might be a good time to outsource the web team.

Well, crazy it might appear to some to release stuff in small bits and do lots and lots of cycles, but it certainly preserves my sanity!