Waterfall and Requirements

We are doing Waterfall. "They" want it to be called Agile using Scrum, but it really is Waterfall. We have nine month release cycles including two months requirements gathering followed by four months development and three months of testing and defect fixing. Before we took over the project it had no process at all, so it is OK now, at least it follows some process. Waterfall is not that bad after all ;-) Currently we are at the end of the development phase and our last sprint will end next Thursday.

Some time ago, the customer suddenly found additional budget and decided to have another requirement implemented. (I have no idea how big organizations can suddenly find more budget, maybe under the mattress of the CEO?) We (the development team) were already booked up with requirements, so he brought in some special people from "Lab X". Lab X is located in off-shoring country Y, but that is not the point here, so let's just assume he found them under a stone. People from lab X had no opportunity to get to know our application, which is eally complex, a Big Ball of Mud with cryptic use cases. Finding your way around our one million lines code base usually takes more than six months for experienced developers.

I had heard about that additional requirement some time ago, but was busy and did not pay much attention. Recently things went bad. The senior developer from Lab X left the company or got rotated to another project, which had already happened before (in another release cycle - another story). I heard that it is common for developers to switch companies in country Y if they get a better offer from a competitor. One or two new junior developers were brought in to continue his work. From what I saw of their code, I do not think they deserve the word "junior" at all: someJavaString == "" is a clear sign that someone has no idea how Java works nor did he or she test the code. I do not blame them, it is not their fault. If you cannot find experienced developers, you have to hire new ones and train them, coach them and let them grow. Maybe they are experienced in another language, I do not know. I just know to expect these things from cheap labour service centres of country Y, where nothing is a problem and everything will be dealt with. "No problem Sir, it will be handled. Everything is OK now."

Right from the beginning two members of our team were asked to team up with the lab to help integrating their code into our product, which - of course - would not need much time. As far as I know they already worked five times as much on the integration as estimated and one went so far to implement parts of the solution on his own time and give it to the lab people to use it instead of their crap, which had not worked. I believe that he should not do that, but I respect my team member to have his reasons, so let him work double shifts if he feels like.

Early on the cycle, some executive or a project manager had signed a document to approve the inclusion of this new feature, so we have no option to escape this mess. I was told that the project manager keeps reminding the customer that his actions have been proven to be problematic but from what I know, the customer's representative is a true alpha-being and will not listen to anything he does not like. (I once had a phone call with a similar executive where I wanted to discuss a certain problem, but during the one hour call I was unable to say a single sentence, so obviously there was no problem and no actions were taken. I really need to improve my communication skills ;-)

So everybody works hard and the current release will be a success including the extra feature, the customer will be happy and nobody will learn anything. As soon as the new feature will be in production, the resources from lab X will vanish and we will be stuck in the quicksand a bit deeper. I hope that the world ends this Xmas as predicted by the Maya calendar and all this ends.