©2013, Cognizant

Paved with Good Intentions:

The slippery slope from Agile

to Scrum-Fall

Avinash Rao

The Session Today

2

Belief in the Agile Tooth Fairy is eroding

The Fall of Waterfall, and Agile Success

Scrum-Fall

Lessons Learnt – Beyond the Case

The Empire Strikes Back

Act 1

Act 2

Act 3

Epilogue

Prologue

| ©2013, Cognizant

Tooth Fairy, Silver Bullets, etc.

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Agile has moved to the Enterprise mainstream …

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Scope based funding

“Do Agile” for the same approved scope and budget

Use outsourcing partners to cut costs – have Scrum teams on tap

“Hmm, so you need a Process Owner from the Business? We are very Busy, but lets see … ”

“Go Agile” makes it easy for programs to J<expletive deleted>DI

We’ve gone from not accounting for evolution and emergence, to making

it up as we go along, with the funding process still asking for predictable Progress

… but “Management” hasn’t changed

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A committed scope (backlog) of functional items, delivered with dispersed teams and SMEs representing the Business; overlaid by the usual corporate IT governance processes

Leading to:

'We'll figure it out as we go along' Architecture

Evolution in corporate security and IT governance guidelines

The Agency problem between business and the representatives of the business

The temptation to build functionality quickly to demonstrate progress

What We Get when we Go Agile

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Act 1: The Fall of Waterfall, and Agile Success

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High visibility Board-reviewed NPD program

~100,000 FP Product Suite

50% budget spent, 25% scope completed

Design Silos – caught only at integration test

At risk of scrappage for the second time!

The Situation

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Requirements phase that takes forever

and then some …

Supporting applications built, and approaching obsolescence

Search for the Perfect solutions

The Usual Suspects were in Play

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Finite scope for 18 month period

Release to business POs, no production releases

Common governance for 3 IT vendors

Continuous Integration

2 week iterations

One Team, common tooling

Full time DevOps team

Clear DoD, with defined Coding and Test coverage standards

The Move to Agile

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3 fold Productivity gain / FP delivered

55% cost reductions / FP delivered

60% reduction in defects slipped out of Dev

On-time deliveries every 2 weeks, integration tested

Agile Awards in UK and USA

The Results

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Happy ending !

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Happy ending !

Right?

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Act 2: The Empire Strikes Back

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But Business wasn’t entirely pleased

As all IT Managers know, this was because Business is Evil

So, IT achieved a famous victory …

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Original scope was not a full replacement for current system in Production

POs had validated Use Cases, not end to end Business Process flows

Fit and Finish issues – anything not in the DoD was inconsistent

However, additional funding provided to complete the product; the Business teams took direct control of the project – IT SMEs replaced by

Business POs for direction setting

Alternate Theories for Business Displeasure

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POs now set scope for each release

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Rework increased 72% when backlog set by POs for each iteration

Designated Process Owners rarely have financial control (or

sometimes even an understanding of the overall business case

and trade-offs) needed to balance progress on improvements

v/s the funding to completed committed scope and Quality.

IT vendors instructed to increase productivity

In return, iteration timelines were

doubled

The BA doesn’t contribute to code velocity, why not replace him with a developer?

Higher Rework Increased Cost Pressures

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80

90

100

1 2 3 4 5 6

PQ

Decreasing PQ Targets

Defects Up, Productivity Down

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0 5 10 15 20 25 30

0 5 10 15

As defects ballooned, teams were

overwhelmed by defect fix effort

Productivity became erratic, and

decreasing (12 month view)

Attrition increased, leading to ….

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Scrum-Fall!

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Scrum-Fall

Fixed Scope

Committed, fixed scope to be delivered every iteration

Game-playing with Buffers to ensure scope committed is

achievable

Additional Teams and Stages

Additional Test Teams, Validation teams …

Added layers mimicking

traditional QA

Measures to increase velocity actually decreased

velocity

Defect fix effort a major drag on productivity

Decreased Velocity

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Lessons Learnt

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Funding Agile Projects

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Phase 1 complete

CRs on Phase 1

Acceptance

Project completion Benefit realization

Project size: 100 FPs; Work done equivalent to 180 FPs

Measured by size (often the basis for funding), Agile projects show a

slower rate of progress because of rework – this rework would have

been funded by CRs on traditional projects

Test the Business Process, not the Use Case

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Business Process

Pass/

Fail

1 Achieves A

2 Achieves B

3 Achieves C

4 Achieves D

5 Achieves E

6 Achieves F

UC 1

UC 2

UC 3

UC 4

Though UCs may Pass testing, Business Processes must Pass for Business

acceptance

Fixing later costs as much as Right-First-Time

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Agile provides a seemingly easy chance to change and improve later … this is not true for NFR and Architectural items

100%

150%

300%

0%

50%

100%

150%

200%

250%

300%

350%

Original cost of

component

Cost of 80%

improvement

Cost of an

additional 10%improvement on

original NFR

Thank You