Scrumban - DevOli/Marvel-chars GitHub Wiki

It is an Agile methodology that combines Scrum and Kanban. It is more flexible in the implementation and can be used for large projects.

Benefits:

Time savings compared to Scrum. No need for estimations or planned sprints. The planning in Scrumban is based on demand and occurs only when the planning trigger goes off. The planning trigger is associated with the number of tasks left in the "To Do" section of the board - when it goes down to a certain number, the planning event is held. (On-demand planning)

Visual aid helps to identify bottle necks in the process of development.

Team empowerment. In Scrumban tasks are not assigned to the team members by the team leader or project manager. Each team member chooses which task from the To Do section they are going to complete next. This guarantees a smooth process flow, where all the team members are equally busy at all times. (Pull system) It is important to use order and prioritization early in the planning event for pulls to have some constraints.

Other features:

Team roles are less relevant.

Bucket size planning brings the possibility of long-term planning to Scrumban. It is based on the system of three buckets that the work items need to go through before making it on the Scrumban board.

Feature freeze is used in Scrumban when the project deadline is approaching. It means that only the features that the team already has for development can still be worked on and no additional features can be added.

Triage usually happens right after feature freeze. With an approaching project deadline, the project manager decides which of the in-development features will be completed and which will stay unfinished. This guarantees that the team can focus on finishing important features before the project deadline and forget the less important ones.

The board:

The basic Scrumban board is composed out of three columns: To Do, Doing and Done. After the planning meeting, the tasks are added to the To Do column, when a team member is ready to work on a task, he/she moves it to the Doing column and when he/she completes it, he/she moves it to the Done column. The Scrumban board visually represents the progress of the team. The task board columns are adapted and expanded based on the team's work progress. The most common add-ons include priority columns in the To Do section and columns like Design, Manufacturing, Testing in the Doing section.

WIP limits -- To ensure that the team is working effectively, Scrumban methodology states that a team member should be working on no more than one task at a time. To make sure this rule is followed Scrumban uses WIP (work in progress) limit. This limit is visualized on top of the Doing section of the board (also could be on each column of that section) and means that only that number of tasks can be in the corresponding column at one time. A WIP limit usually is equal to the number of people in the team but could be expanded based on the specifics of the team's work.

To Do limits -- In order to have more productive planning meetings, the number of tasks in the To Do section can be limited as well. The same as with WIP limits, it is written at the top of the To Do section or on top of the corresponding columns and limits the number of tasks in the To Do section or specific columns.