Recently we switched from scrum to kanban at one of our client’s projects. There is quite a buzz around kanban in the agile community, Henrik Kniberg wrote an excellent comparison between Scrum and Kanban.
Our project has got several software and hardware disciplines. Some disciplines have got a different ‘heartbeat’ than the software team. ‘Done’ features implemented by the software team constantly need to be validated with new and revised mechanics and updated electronics. Unforeseen issues will pop up (some blocking for the system integrators) and need to be fixed….now! Scrum isn’t very helpful here due to the sprint agreement with the product owner. The team switched to shorter sprints of about 2 weeks. This was a good improvement in providing the testers with a [potentially shippable] product more often.
However, since we’ve nearly reached ‘feature complete’, it’s hard to fill a sprint with known issues and work. Along with the team’s wish to be more reactive to blocking issues I proposed to move from scrum to kanban. Especially the possibility to have specialist columns on the ’scrumboard’ are really promising. I am keen on getting to know the effect of focusing on lead time and reducing this.
What did we keep:
- Scrumboard: added specialist columns: eg. .NET / JAVA / System Integration
- Daily standup
- The product owner: prioritises the remaining product backlog
- 2 weekly delivery of done work to get feedback from P.O. and other stakeholders
- Retrospective: team / process improvement
What did we stop:
- Team wide planning: some specialists are however still pokering and planning: why not
- the scrummaster role
- software only team, opened up the standup for different groups.
I will add new experiences along the way.
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#1 by Jurgen Onland at May 26th, 2009
Why did you stop the role of scrummaster? One of the key roles of the scrummaster is to deal with the impedement list. So how deal Kanban team with impedements?
#2 by Jorg Hollenberg at May 28th, 2009
This is one of our major questions. The typical scrummaster role is not needed, since scrum values and practices don’t need to be enforced and maintained. Some sort of team lead / coach / enabler is seems to be required (at least in this project).
More disciplines are joining at the standup, any impediments should popup instantly and be dealt with after the standup by the engineer who has picked up the issue. The focus should be on minimizing the leadtime, removing an impediment is part of the job.
or: Hail kanbanmaster?