Waterfall and Agile in the same project

[JHulet]

Is it possible to have both Waterfall and Agile methodologies in the same project? We have multichannel campaigns and one of our channels uses Agile and the rest use waterfall. If we put them all in one project...is there a way to pull certain tasks into Agile sprints? Or would the entire project have to be in Agile?

[Madalyn_Destafney]

Hi there, this is rooted more in how your teams are set up, not with the templates/project setup. A team can be set as Agile or not, which means they have some other settings/iterations/etc. that other WF teams do not. You can definitely have a project of tasks assigned to some people on an Agile team and some not, and those with tasks on an Agile team can be pulled into their sprints/iterations. Am I answering your question? If so, please mark correct to help others : )

[Richard_Le_]

Hi,

As Madalyn said, the team assignment (and how that team is configured) is what controls whether or not a task can be managed in an agile way. When a task is assigned to an agile team, it will appear within the team's backlog where they can subsequently plan it into a sprint. So to answer your question, yes, both waterfall can agile practices can be followed in the same project. 

One "gotcha" to be aware of for SCRUM teams is that when a task is added to an iteration, its planned start and completion dates automatically update to the start and end date of that iteration. I've seen this cause problems in the past for projects that follow both waterfall and agile practices. For example, a project may have a task that is planned to start and complete tomorrow. If that task was added to a 2 week sprint that starts in a weeks time, it could cause the whole project timeline to shift by 3 weeks (1 week delay until sprint starts + 2 weeks for sprint to end). 

Hope that helps!

Best Regards,

Rich

[Madalyn_Destafney]

Hi Richard & @JHulet - thankfully this gotcha you mention was resolved early last year at some point I think, it's an Agile setting where the task in the sprint does NOT have to adopt to the iteration timeframe (or vice versa, I forget) but that was a huge headache for us too and that has been updated where you can choose to have the tasks adhere to the iteration timeframe or the task duration timeframe.

[Madalyn_Destafney]

A screenshot would have helped. Here it is in the Agile team settings: