In my lightning talk, I mentioned that I like to refer to our previous methodology (what we were doing prior to moving to Scrum) as “Waterhocking.”  I think it accurately captures the nature of our previous process.  It was definitely ad-hoc in so far as we weren’t following any particular project management framework and just handling things as they came up on a case-by-case basis.  It was similar to heavyweight “waterfall” methods in that we had extensive requirements gathering and documentation phases (BDUF), lengthy periods where the team would keep heads down and just try to build exactly what was documented, and too little user and acceptance testing too late.  Lastly, our releases often felt like we were hocking the product up since we were often under a fixed deadline and killing ourselves to get a product out the door only to find that the customer wasn’t happy with what was delivered.

Apparently, this label struck a chord with my fellow participants – it has a few mentions on twitter.  I’m definitely looking forward to tomorrow’s sessions; my only regret is that I can’t be in six or seven places at once.  There are so many really experienced, really insightful people here it is impossible not to miss great talks.

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