Is Water-Scrum-Fall Reality? On the Use of Agile and Traditional Development Practices

Abstract

For years, agile methods are considered the most promising route toward successful software development, and a considerable number of published studies the (successful) use of agile methods and reports on the benefits companies have from adopting agile methods. Yet, since the world is not black or white, the question for what happened to the traditional models arises. Are traditional models replaced by agile methods? How is the transformation toward Agile managed, and, moreover, where did it start? With this paper we close a gap in literature by studying the general process use over time to investigate how traditional and agile methods are used. Is there coexistence or do agile methods accelerate the traditional processes' extinction? The findings of our literature study comprise two major results: First, studies and reliable numbers on the general process model use are rare, i.e., we lack quantitative data on the actual process use and, thus, we often lack the ability to ground process-related research in practically relevant issues. Second, despite the assumed dominance of agile methods, our results clearly show that companies enact context-specific hybrid solutions in which traditional and agile development approaches are used in combination.

Bottom-up Adoption of Continuous Delivery in a Stage-Gate Managed Software Organization

“…Previous research has identified that integrating agile methods with traditional processes is possible and common [15,26,25]. This is verified also by our case study, because the case was using Serum to organize their development work.…”

“…Theocharis et al [25] studied whether agile methods replace traditional processes altogether when adopted or do they coexist afterwards. They conclude that agile and traditional processes are often combined as hybrid approaches.…”

Scrum with the Spices of Agile Family: A Systematic Mapping

“…Later, this claim was confirmed by Theocharis et al [23] through a systematic review. Kuhrmann et al [17] conducted a survey on hybrid approaches for software development and found that they have become mainstream, also, their adoption in industry is irrespective of the organization size and industry sector.…”

An Exploratory Study on Applying a Scrum Development Process for Safety-Critical Systems

“…They mentioned: Conducting experiments with professionals as a first step should not be encouraged unless high sample sizes are guaranteed or performing replicas is cheap. In our research, there exists few industrial projects for developing safety-critical systems fully adopted a Scrum development process according to the preliminary research [35]. S-Scrum was also proposed in 2016 as a high-level process model.…”