Question

The ABC Software company has been in the market place for over 20 years. While some of the development team members have changed over time, there was a firmly established culture using the Waterfall method. The typical process involved setting product requirements up front, some generated directly from customers and others determined by employees (developers and product managers, for example) who attempted to gauge the customer's needs indirectly. Once requirements were determined, specification documents would be written with varying details of the intended functionalities. The specification documents would contain time estimates for completion, and it was common to have a team working on several features simultaneously, with some features requiring many weeks of development time. Developers would proceed to coding the requirements and once complete would hand the software developed to the test team. Testing effort would involve unit testing the features using the “black Box” method. The last part of the development process usually between 3 and 4 months would be dedicated to final pass testing, including a regression testing phase. Over time, the code base and complexity of the underlying code grew significantly. From the initial version of the product consisting of 5,000,000 lines of code, the size of the code has grown to over 22,000,000 lines of codes for the current release. The dedicated maintenance development team grew from 10 dedicated people in 1997 to 70 in 2014. The code base also quadrupled during the same period, from 5 million lines of code to over 20 millions. While the relationship appears to be linear, the number of additional people working on maintenance was actually higher than 40 people dedicated for maintenance. On average, it was common to have developers spending 15% of their time working on maintenance related issues. The increase in people maintaining the existing codes contributes to the complexity of the codes over time. The average time to market for each major release was around 1.5 years, comparable to that of its competitors. Overall product quality was fair and there was concern that the organisation was not responsive enough to customers' needs. Pls be advised not to give your answer in bullet point format. You are also required to supply your answers in the context of the ABC software company.

Answer 1

Hi,

Please find the answer below:

#1

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Adopting Waterfall model, the organization teams are idle for large chunks of time.

The product is monolithic with huge code base. As we can teams are idle several weeks during the product life cycle. For example, the test team is idle during the huge development phase and the development team being idle during the 3 – 4-month regression final pass test.

Transitioning to Agile would allow the organizations teams to split into small scrum teams and development delivery effort into small cycles called ‘sprints. This increases the overall productivity and early feedback loops from the customer. This way the company would be more responsive to the customer needs. The large time to market around 1.5years would be reduced to short releases spanned either monthly or quarterly based on the scrum team’s velocity.

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#2

Organization firmly culture to the waterfall model would be an obstacle for transition of waterfall model to Agile. Agile transition needs a revamp of organization structure, thought process, learning (agile concepts), tools (agile tools) and roles (scrum master) etc. A 20-year old company that’s inclined to waterfall model would face lot of challenges to transition to Agile methodology.

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