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4 - From Waterfall to Evolutionary Development and Test

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

John Watkins
Affiliation:
IBM Software Group, UK
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Summary

SYNOPSIS

Evolutionary Development (Evo) focuses on early delivery of high value to stakeholders and on obtaining and utilizing stakeholder feedback. This case study describes, from a project manager's viewpoint, the results that one organization rapidly achieved after switching from using a waterfall approach to Evo. The major benefits of adopting an Evo approach come from reducing the duration of the requirements phase from four to five weeks down to just one week, and from paying greater attention to the quality requirements as opposed to the previous practice of concentrating solely on the required functionality, resulting in a happier workforce, happier clients, and more business.

Introduction

My name is Tom Gilb and I am an independent testing consultant and author of Competitive Engineering: A Handbook for Systems & Software Engineering Management using Planguage (2005), Principles of Software Engineering Management (1988), and Software Inspection (1993). My book Software Metrics (1976) coined the term and was used as the basis for the Software Engineering Institute Capability Maturity Model Level Four (SEI CMM Level 4 [37]). My most recent interests are development of true software engineering and systems engineering methods.

In 1997 Kai Gilb and I published a book entitled Evo: The Evolutionary Project Management and Product Development Handbook, describing an agile software development and testing project management method [32]. Evo is an iterative method in which a series of small delivery steps are taken until the project goals are reached and the software delivered.

Type
Chapter
Information
Agile Testing
How to Succeed in an Extreme Testing Environment
, pp. 31 - 36
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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