Waterfall Agile Hybrid for Cloud

Agile is a pretty huge demand skillset now. It must be surprising to think that Agile was once frown upon as a non-mainstream methodology in the past. I used to be one such “hidden” Agile practitioner until I came out in 2013.

Journey to Agile

Agile have its roots from many models and one of them was Rapid Prototyping Development (RAD). I was exposed to RAD using tool like Visual Basic. This was where I begin to explore incremental changes deployment rapidly contrary to a traditional Waterfall development model. Without realizing, I had started my journey towards Agile methodologies.

Formalize Agile with XP

As I became more experienced with RAD, I decided to look into a formal methods that could incorporate changes faster and systematically. A new paradigm opened up in the form of Extreme Programming (XP), with concepts of pair programming and emphasis of code quality over documentations. It was not easy to implement XP in a traditional team setting compared to using Agile by myself.

Minority Agile

The limitations of Agile shows itself when I tried to implement XP for teamwork. The Agile mindset was more difficult to adopt for many as majority of education system had emphasised on Waterfall model. The lack of support towards Agile methodology was disheartening during the period of 2005-2012. However, I had persisted with Agile even though it remains as minority within the IT space. Putting my signatory in agilemanifesto.org had helped to serve as a constant reminder to strive on with Agile.

SCRUM certification

In the midst of my search for an Agile company, I came across a job requirements for SCRUM. In a way, the emergence of Agile or SCRUM in job ads shows signs of change in the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). A key reason for this change came from the shorter deployment time of mobile application and eCommerce. Gaining confidence that Agile will be the game changer, I got certified with SCRUM instead.

Waterfall Agile Hybrid Model

The expected surge in Agile did not really take off as much as I expected from 2014 to 2016. SCRUM soon died away as well. As what Agile preach on handling change, I learnt to incorporate Agile practices within a Waterfall model which I termed the Waterfall Agile Hybrid model. This model fits systems best with configuration paradigm and cloud technologies while conforming to the norms of Waterfall.

Waterfall Agile Hybrid for Cloud

The explosion of cloud technologies pushed Agile into mainstream! Cloud implementation multiplied and marry Agile with it. The rest becomes history as Waterfall took a backseat. While Agile becomes the new norm for Cloud, the Waterfall roots remains entrenched in many parts of organizations ranging for budget planning, approval process and finance. Thus, Waterfall Agile Hybrid model remains relevant until an organization completes its transformation to a pure Agile entity.