Chronicle of a Death Foretold = Waterfall Shmoterfall = Checkmate in 10 moves
* Note: I did see, participate and lead some successful waterfall projects (mainly due to some adoption of agile methodologies ;-) and this is my view of the projects which failed…
- Release scoping start with marketing high-level-copy-paste-from-last-year-marketing-presentations MRD in ~1 month delay
- 1 month of quick lets-write-all-the-features-we-can PRD – This is also the last time you hear from the product manager until the next milestone-demo-crisis.
- High level design for a couple of weeks which sum-up to a Very Rough Time Guesstimate a.k.a. VeRTiGo
- Release time-frame is set ~1 year ahead with the needed VeRTiGo “squeezing” and high level time-frame is determined:
- 2 months of the waste above and last release leftover
- 1-2 months of Planning (functional and technical design)
- 4-5 months of Development – with ~3 Major Milestones
- 3 months of QA & stabilization
- 1 month of Project Buffer
- Very soon the development teams are scattered like lonely wolfs - everyone for himself until the next integration or major milestones months away.
- First milestone is ending with:
- 20% of the content is really Done a.k.a. “Even a Blind Chicken Finds a Kernel of Corn Now and Then”
- 50% is “done” with dirty bugy code, low quality, performance issues with missing or wrong functionality
- 30% is just not ready
- Developers and low level management remind themselves yet again to put more buffers…
- The PMO suggest (in relax and trusting tone) to postpone the milestone or remove content.
- Management doesn’t get in panic (they have seen it before ;-) and decide not to decide: “Let’s see if we can cut the drawback in the next Milestone” a.k.a. The classic do {} while(timeRemaining > Last Milestone)
- Next milestone has much more content and the pressure builds up… until the last milestone blaming game which usually ends up with ~2 month delay and half of the planned content.
Checkmate
