To Scrum or not to Scrum?
Gathering software requirements can be a complex task for many reasons, requirements can change, or new ones can arise. Depending on product or business needs. The Waterfall model (Requirements + Design + Implementation + Verification + Maintenance) requires all requirements to be gathered before designing a product; once the product design is completed, it is ready for testing and deployment. If a new requirement arises while testing the product it would disrupt the whole process and design will have to be reconsidered, so the new requirement will have to be addressed at a later time, version or project, and consequently the client may not be too happy about it because it might hinder his or her business process.
The Scrum framework follows an incremental and iterative approach, this means that new requirements can be added each time the product is tested by the user until the product is completed and in perfect alignment with the client's needs. In order to accomplish this we need a product vision, all stakeholders, customers, end-users, management need to come up with a vision for the product and what they want the product to achieve, once we have a vision a Sprint Backlog can be built. The product backlog will have all the features of the product organized by priority. The team working on the solution will tackle high priority items first and will get a manageable group of features to build a Backlog Sprint, where we will have requirements that will be organized into tasks and activities that will be scheduled and then the increment/iteration cycle begins to review requirements, design, coding, testing of this spring until the product is completed. Each increment will be reviewed during the Sprint Review, the key here is to have a working product for review.
