Evaluation of Project Architecture in Software Development Mixing Waterfall and Agile by Using Process Simulation

For software development, especially massive software systems, a waterfall process is used traditionally. A waterfall process can be highly effective on the condition that a master plan is fixed and the possibility of changes and uncertain rework is low. However, in software development projects, many kinds of reworks occur corresponding to uncertain requirement changes and program bugs. In addition, with the advent of cloud-based software platforms and continuous development operations, it is possible to develop a software system while operating the system. To respond to this situation, software development projects often adopt an agile process. Agility may allow conditional response to uncertain rework, yet at the same time it may be difficult to control the achievement of known project targets. Recently, many cases of adopting mixed processes including waterfall and agile have been reported in the massive software development projects. In this paper, we argue that the mixed process architecture should ...