Scrumbanfall: An Agile Integration of Scrum and Kanban with Waterfall in Software Engineering

Abstract

Software industries have been growing with the rise of automation technologies and looking for change in their software development practices to gain the benefits of automation technologies for achieving their business goals. Agile Business Process Reengineering (ABPR) is trending approach for Software Engineering Management (SEM) in software industries, which helps software development organization in transformation of software development practices. Scrum and Kanban are fascinating Agile methodologies adopted by Software Engineering Management practitioners. Scrumban, a mixture of both Scrum and Kanban, has derived strengths of both frameworks, in formation of a robust framework against challenges of Agile Software Engineering (ASE) methodologies like work flow control, lead time management, product delivery that could not be solved by Scrum or Kanban as a standalone framework. But still some of challenges, which are out of scope of Scrumban like project requirement documentation, planning, scheduling, estimation and clear product vision at initial stage of the project. Such issues have raised a request of research for Software Process Reengineering (SPR) in Scrumban by customizing its structure for to form the next level of hybrid framework. The Traditional SDLC methodology ‘Waterfall’ has answers for such issues. An empirical analysis, for resolution of such issues, with the help of ‘Waterfall’ model and its life cycle protocols is the main goal this research study by integrating Scrum and Kanban with Waterfall to form a hybrid framework ‘Scrumbanfall’ aligning Kanban in center of integration under the boundary of Scrum rules. This research also highlights limitations of Scrumbanfall like team members and their roles and capabilities for the large scaled project having team members in distributed environment, which open the door for next level of research to overcome such challenges using further hybridization of Scrumbanfall.