Scrum and ZenHub at CDISC

For those projects following the Scrum process, ZenHub is an easy-to-implement tool that is tightly integrated into GitHub. It carries many features that are directly part of the official Scrum canon, and other non-canon features that have been traditionally used by Scrum Teams.

If you have been brought onto one of the CDISC teams, either as a CDISC employee/contractor or as an outside collaborator, you will likely be part of a Scrum team as Scrum is our typical development process for software. As such, you will be asked to begin using ZenHub for managing the development work. ZenHub is an excellent tool for running a Scrum process and, most importantly, is tightly integrated into GitHub.

As described elsewhere, configuration and getting up to speed in ZenHub is incredibly rapid. Also, the platform provides a great deal of flexibility allowing teams to implement their Scrum as best fits the team. Other than using the basics of Scrum, there is little demand that needs to be placed on teams. After all

There are no best practices, only practices that happen to be most appropriate for the particular situation within which they are being deployed.

Kanban?

There have been a few discussions of Kanban use at CDISC. Though ZenHub is targeted at Scrum, it implements a Kanban board and could certainly be used to support a Kanban process.

When would you want to use Kanban? Whereas Scrum excels in situation with new deliverables and many unknowns (software development, for example), there are some groups who understand well what they are creating. A canonical example would be a network-drop installation team. In a large organization that manages many network drops (say, a school district) they will usually have a team that installs them repeatedly. In that situation a Kanban board is a great tool for managing the work. The feedback loops of Scrum are not necessarily a great benefit for a team.

If we have teams using Kanban regularly they may wish to implement Cycle-time or WIP (Work-in-progress) or other metrics that ZenHub does not support.