Widely Used but also Highly Valued? Acceptance Factors and Their Perceptions in Water-Scrum-Fall Projects

Agile methodologies like Scrum propose drastic changes with respect to team hierarchies, organizational structures, planning or controlling processes. To mitigate the level of change and retain some established processes, many organizations prefer to introduce hybrid agile-traditional methodologies that combine agile with traditional development practices. Despite their importance in practice, only a few studies have examined the acceptance of such methodologies, however. In this paper, we present the results of a qualitative study that was conducted at a Swiss bank. It uses Water-Scrum-Fall, which combines Scrum with traditional practices. Based on the Diffusion of Innovations theory, we discuss several acceptance factors and investigate how they are perceived. The results indicate that, compared to traditional development methodologies, some aspects of Water-Scrum-Fall bring relative advantages and are more compatible to the way developers prefer to work. Yet, there also exist potential acceptance barriers such as a restricted individual autonomy and increased process complexity.