posted 17 years ago
If you're trapped in an unhealthy waterfall schedule, say with 8 months of coding and 12 weeks of QA (from experience), you can sneak some agile ideas in and make life better. Break a handful of giant use cases into dozens of small features visible to the user. Break 8 months of coding into 17 iterations with full build, integration and internal release. If you have a couple customers or QA folks who are mature enough to look at unfinished systems they can help validate the internal releases.
I would definitely not recommend anybody set out to design such a process on purpose. It isn't "genuine agile" and it isn't ideal, but it might be a first step out of the primordial ooze.
A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of the idea. John Ciardi