Why it’s time to move from Waterfall to Agile

From Waterfall to Agile

Here at Clearvision, we often talk to customers who are trying to make the move from a Waterfall-based approach to an Agile methodology. There’s an internet full of information out there about why you should go Agile – detailing why Agile is better and what Agile improves. It’s not surprising so many are making that move.

Of course, we always come across a few team members who aren’t quite sold…

• Why do we need to change at all?
• What’s wrong with our current process?
• We won’t see any improvements after the move!

These are the sorts of comments and questions we hear on a regular basis, so a big aspect of going Agile is training your team. This is why we’ve designed our training courses so they contain a whole host of activities and games to get people “thinking Agile”, so they begin to see the benefits straight away! I wanted to share one of those with you now.

Battleships

I am sure you have all heard of the game “Battleships”. We’ve modified this ever-popular board game to prove some very valuable points.

First, let’s take a quick, high level look at the concepts of Waterfall vs. Agile for a moment:

• A Waterfall process involves planning, estimating and scheduling all your work from beginning to end. There’s very little scope for adapting to change, particularly if something goes wrong.
• Agile methodologies suggest planning and progressing your work in small pieces using an iterative approach, allowing you to learn from your errors or misjudgements.

Let’s consider these in the game of Battleships.

Waterfall

When following a waterfall process, you are effectively planning every shot in advance.

How do you know if your shot is a success? How can you react if something goes wrong? Waterfall development is just the same. Sometimes it’ll work out and you’ll hit every target on the board, but other times you’ll miss everything – and by then it’s too late to change it! What’s more, each and every shot is costing you money.

Agile

Using Agile methodologies, you fire off fewer shots at one time.

You can see much earlier what worked and what didn’t. Most importantly, you can even react to your results!

We firmly believe that your teams and users won’t learn everything the need if they aren’t fully on board with the changes. Our training uses games similar to this and many, many more to really drive the point home. Just take a quick look at the example above – the benefits of Agile are plain to see!

If you’re interested in finding out more about how Clearvision can help your teams – whether it’s in becoming more Agile or mastering the Atlassian tools and more – then click here to explore our training offerings. Throughout the month of September we’re offering 20% off all of our training courses, so claim your offer today!

_{Screenshots are taken from an open source online version of the game available here. Credit goes to Daniël van Hoesel, Bob Forma and Mark Suurmond for its creation.}