Agile 2008 – Scrum and Kanban
Tuesday, August 12, 2008 – 3:00 AMCorey Ladas of Modus Cooperandi talked about “Starting a Kanban System for Software Engineering with Value Stream Maps and Theory of Constraints“
The section of this talk that was about applying Kanban to an existing Scrum process, “Scrum-ban“, can be found on Corey’s blog. What this does for you is allows you to evolve Scrum into something that involves less ceremony (planning) around each sprint/iteration or how to move towards a leaner planning approach:
The ideal work planning process should always provide the development team with best thing to work on next, no more and no less.
The end result is a team that implements a pull model for new work. It asks for new work very frequently rather than batching it up each iteration. Batching leads to waste as more incomplete work is effectively added to the system. It does require some uniformity in the size of the work items entering the system for this approach to work however.
Corey’s article shows how to evolve a batched Scrum process into something that used pull so you don’t have to disrupt the team with a big change. I’d definitely like to see us do more of this at p&p.
Corey also has a list of the other Lean/Kanban related sessions at Agile 2008.
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2 Responses to “Agile 2008 – Scrum and Kanban”
In this “pull model” of working, where “lean planning” is limited to 1 sprint itself, do you see a danger of teams slipping into a mode where the overall model/end-2-end scenario takes a backseat and is probably not in anyone’s head (or document).. Leading to frequent changes & rework as one moves from sprint to sprint.
I am a big fan of lean planning cycles and NOT spending months on writing end-2-end functional specs which never see light of the day…. However, the other extreme view of “preaching” that no one in the team should think beyond a single sprint – seems way unoptimal as well.
One need to strike a balance between – not spending months thinking about (planning) what needs to be done and not being too short sighted (where the “entire team” thinks of only as much as needs to be implemented in next 1 month)..
I was wondering if I was the only one with such thoughts?
By Amit on Aug 19, 2008