Scrum and RUP expirience

Many developers and companies are screaming - Scrum!!

Background:

I work in a company which develop & supports its own software products.

Our products - are web enterprise applications with code base 0.5-1.5 millions line of code.
We have mature team (60+ persons), with NO screaming manager/boss. We skilled QC team. And we all respect each other.

We used RUP(Rational Unified Process) in the past:

In the initial development phase - we perform tons of investigation, estimations, develop a documents with UI mockups, develop architecture, interfaces, prototyping, etc. This phase took about 1-6 month.
Only after that phase - we start implementation phase in which we start writing a real app.


Recently, our managers decided to use Scrum in development of a new big project.
They hired a "positive" Scrum Master just for this project.
Funny, but the things don't changed. We named first tree-four sprints as "Initial" and done same things as in Initial phase of RUP. As result - Product Owner do NOT see any working software for same 3-4 mouth (as in RUP case) except some simple prototypes.

Here thoughts about that:
  • If your team is mature and skilled enough - it will work effectively in any development process: RUP, Scrum, Waterfall, etc.
  • If your project is big, and require a lot of investigation and architecture work - you will faced with  "Initial" development phase in any case. 
    • Yes, you can iteratively extend prototypes as working Demo for each sprint - but it is waste of time (application prototypes do not have any architecture, so, to become a working - it need to be rewritten). 

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