Why Scrum is better than Waterfall?

As part of Risk Management Strategy, lets look at “What If” scenarios.

Possible reasons software development projects could stop before their projected date of completion are:

·         There can be budget cuts

·         There can be a change in the project priority

·         The project may have gone over the approved budget

·         The company may be taken over

Lets assume that there was a budget cut and what if the project stopped at 60% of the effort/time? Let’s compare Project W (Waterfall) with Project S ( Agile Scrum)

Project W  ( Pure Waterfall)	Project S ( Agile-Scrum)
10% of effort/time in setting up and Project scope	10% of effort/time in setting up and Project scope
25% of effort/time is spend on analysis of the software product	80% of effort/time spent in analyzing, developing and testing product increments that are delivered iteratively every sprint.
40% of effort/time is spent on development and system testing	10% of effort/time involved in setting up and scoping the project.
15% of effort/time in fixing defects and executing integration, regression thro’ acceptance.
10% time spent to properly close the project.

If Waterfall Project W stopped working at say 60% of effort/time spent, then only possibly 10% of the features would have been delivered.

If Agile Scrum Project S stopped working at 60% of effort/time spent, then a good amt of sprints are already delivered (probably 40%-50% of the product backlog features) to the customers.

If we compare the earned values between the Pure Waterfall and Agile scrum,

Project W  ( Pure Waterfall)	Project S ( Agile-Scrum)
0% of effort/time involved in setting up and scoping the project.	0% of effort/time involved in setting up and scoping the project.
10% of effort/time is spend on analysis and design documentation, source code value of the software product	50% of effort/time spent in analyzing, developing and testing product increments that are delivered iteratively in bi-weekly basis.
Completed testing Packaged software is worth 10% of the total value	Completed testing Packaged software is worth 50% of the total value