This is a common problem, but I'm going through it again so thought I would ask how others have dealt with it. I'm the only BA on a small team that does enhancements and bugfixes for an external client. We have three QA people and four developers, two PMS and me. And as I said, we work waterfall and are quite comfy with that (it's a mature system in maintenance mode so it's fine).

Since we're all W2 employees of our company (that does government contracts, one of which our team supports) we work on this system year round. We typically have two large releases each year and one or two small releases. In between releases we work on some housekeeping stuff like process improvement or researching change requests.

The problem is that another thing our manager encourages in between releases is to start working ahead. So for example, he'll get the QA team to start writing test plans for change requests based on nothing more than the CR wording itself. The problem is that we start working on the release backwards when things really get going. For example, the release we're trying to start right now.

We built a list of proposed CRs and the client is reviewing them. While they do that (there have been some delays on their side that are out of our control), the QA team (in this order!):

Drafted many test plans for proposed CRs

Started drafting test cases

Started drafting detailed design documents

And now started complaining that we don't have a requirements document yet... of course because I've been kept busy preparing for the meeting with the client to review the CRs and making many, many, many changes to the proposed CR list. If we keep on in this fashion they're going to have to revise their designs, test plans and test cases. So much rework all around. It's just not efficient and more importantly, the rework could in theory cause us to deliver the release late!

Any good ideas for how to not get in this situation? I understand that the managers don't want us all sitting around twiddling our thumbs while we wait for each step to complete. But working ahead isn't ideal. What do your waterfall teams do to stay busy while a release kicks off?