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Thursday, June 5, 2014 - 12:45pm - 2:00pm
Waterfall & Agile
BT7

She's Scrum, He's Waterfall: Can This Relationship Be Saved?

Do your developers want to try a new approach but are constrained because your customer or project manager isn’t interested in changing? Heather Oppenheimer shares the story of how one company was able to reconcile the development team’s desire to use Scrum with the customer’s requirement for status reporting based on waterfall phases. When they started, the project managers were complaining that they weren’t getting the status information they needed, and the developers were whining that their priorities were being changed daily. Even though the company was keeping customers happy by delivering reliable products, everyone was frustrated. Heather shares how you can bring your developers and project managers together by transforming mismatched expectations into a smoothly flowing process—balancing the need for quick response to change with the need for focused development priorities. She addresses the information and reporting formats required by each of the different stakeholders, and describes how to use both Scrum and waterfall lifecycles appropriately to meet everyone’s needs.

Heather Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer Partners, LLC

A senior partner in Oppenheimer Partners, Heather Oppenheimer guides clients in using techniques adapted from software architecture best practices and agile methodologies to design process solutions that work for them―without adding unnecessary overhead. Heather consults and provides training and appraisals for clients in the public and private sectors worldwide, working with both small service delivery and embedded software development organizations and large globally-distributed development projects.

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