© 2010 Proyectalis Gestión de Proyectos S.L.
An approach to Scrumban Whitepaper - Ideacamp
Reducing, measuring and controlling uncertainty
© 2010 Proyectalis Gestión de Proyectos S.L.
Disclaimer: this presentation is meant for reading rather than
presenting…
© 2010 Proyectalis Gestión de Proyectos S.L.
Ángel Medinilla Telecom Engineer / vocational
programmer 13+ years in industry, mainly as a
project manager & agile consultant
Entrepreneur, Blogger Motorbikes, Aikido, gaming,
books, travel, music, gourmet cooking, wines, comics…
Certified Scrum Master - PMI Member - Agile Spain Co-Founder [email protected] http://twitter.com/angel_m http://es.linkedin.com/in/angelm http://slideshare.net/proyectalis http://www.presionblogosferica.com (spanish) http://www.proyectalis.com/en/blog (english, upcoming)
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This presentation is about combining Scrum & Kanban
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There are two main schools of thought out there:
Scrumban & Kan-bum
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Kan-bum guys do a full Kanban implementation, but they add some
Scrum Liturgy
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Selected. Dev. Ready
Valid. Pending
Integration Done! 3 4
1 1
There is someone very similar to a Product Owner, and sometimes (maybe on a weekly / monthly basis) he’ll call
for a prioritization, estimation & planning meeting
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Selected. Dev. Ready
Valid. Pending
Intergration Done! 3 4
1 1
He will be responsible for writing stories, prioritizing them and even setting a Quality of Service for each story
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Selected. Dev. Ready
Valid. Pending
Integration Done! 3 4
1 1
On those meetings, maybe they’ll do a Demo and give their stakeholders (uh, I meant chickens) a whole vision of
what they’re building and ask for some feedback
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Selected. Dev. Ready
Valid. Pending
Integration Done! 3 4
1 1
The team would be probably doing some kind of Daily Meeting, so they can share, coordinate and decide
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Selected. Dev. Ready
Valid. Pending
Integration Done! 3 4
1 1
In order to fine-tune their Kanban board, they’ll have to frequently reflect on how to become more effective
(continuous retrospective)
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Beautiful! but sometimes it’s nice to have time boxes, burn-downs, fixed delivery dates or it’s too difficult for the team to work with WIP limits....
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Or maybe our team is still too used to Scrum and finds it difficult to do a
complete switch to Kam-bum
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Sooo… now let’s take a look at the Scrumban guys.
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Selected. Dev. Valid. Pending Integration Done!
They probably started with the typical Scrum Board, with columns mapping their value stream, but with no WIP limit
or queues
Burn-down::
Release Plan:
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Selected. Dev. Valid. Pending Integration Done!
Sometimes they have to do some bug fixing, and sometimes the client asks for small and / or urgent tasks
Burn-down::
Release Plan:
! ! ! !
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This leads to Context Switching
it’s identified as an impediment by the team, and even though the Product Owner understands it, client & product
nature makes this emergent tasks unavoidable.
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Different approaches as a Separate Maintenance Team were tried
but it made situation worse: maintenance team motivation dropped, knowledge was scattered and value stream was
worsened for this kind of work.
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So their velocity is not very predictable, and is hard to know why sometimes they seem to do more or less
Velocity
? ?
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They looked at Scrum Literature, but all they could find was something
about Focus Factor
It was like reading “it’s your fault you can’t focus only on Product Backlog during Sprints, and we don’t care a bit
about what happens out of your focus factor”
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So they started doing something: they tracked what was going on out
of their Focus Factor
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Selected. Dev. Valid. Pending Integration Done!
They created a separate board (or a new lane on the old board) where they started to track bugs and emergent
tasks
Burn-down::
Release Plan:
Selected. Dev. Valid. Pending Integration Done!
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Selected. Dev. Valid. Pending Integration Done!
They didn’t estimate bugs or emergent tasks in advance, but they gave them some effort number once they were
done.
Burn-down::
Release Plan:
Selected. Dev. Valid. Pending Integration Done!
This was definitely a 3…
5
1
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Selected. Dev. Valid. Pending Integration Done!
So at the end of the sprint, they could measure up how much effort did they put on bugs & unpredictable tasks
Selected. Dev. Valid. Pending Integration Done!
V Scrum
V Kanban
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Selected. Dev. Valid. Pending Integration Done!
(By the way, they called this “Kanban”, even tough it’s not really Kanban as there’s no WIP limit yet… Just hope
the Kanban Police doesn’t find out )
Selected. Dev. Valid. Pending Integration Done!
V Scrum
V Kanban
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As soon as they had some numbers, they were able to commit better on how much effort would they put both in
Scrum & Kanban development
V Scrum V Kanban
80 20
85 20
75 30
70 35
75 25
80 25
? ?
¿Your prediction?
Uuuh… Well, on average we make something like 75 scrum points per sprint. Guess we can commit on that as long as you keep the kanban level safe…
That means somewhere below 25 kanban points
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They were also able to understand and explain what happened during a given Sprint
V Scrum V Kanban
80 20
85 20
75 30
70 35
75 25
80 25
60 50
Yaaargh! You failed on your commitment!
No, in fact we did 110 points of aggregated velocity, which is quite good. It was YOU who told us to prioritize 50 Kanban points during the Sprint and made us fail the sprint goal
That means we’re great and you suck. Maybe we should discuss this with the CEO
!
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Selected. Dev. Valid. Pending Integration Done!
Soon, they started to differentiate good Kanban (value to the customer) from bad Kanban (bug fixing). Bad Kanban
does not add to velocity, but affects it.
Selected. Dev. Valid. Pending Integration Done!
V Scrum
V Kanban +
V Kanban -
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And they started to see the effect that bugs and emergent tasks had on Scrum Velocity
Velocity
Vavg Scrum
Vavg Kanban +
Vavg Kanban -
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So they could take decisions on things like increasing investment on bug fixing or stop emergent tasks if project
is running late
Velocity
Vavg Scrum
Vavg Kanban +
Vavg Kanban -
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Selected. Dev. Valid. Pending Integration Done!
They still had a problem: how to know on which task should they work next? Should they get the next Scrum
task or the next Kanban task?
Burn-down::
Release Plan:
Selected. Dev. Valid. Pending Integration Done!
? ? ? ?
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Selected. Dev. Valid. Pending Integration Done!
So they implemented a simple and visual quality of service mechanism(QoS)
Burn-down::
Release Plan:
CO
MM
ITTE
D
PR
IO
Fire!
ASA
P
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Fire!
Selected. Dev. Valid. Pending Integration Done!
The Fire lane meant “drop whatever you’re doing, there’s a server on fire and we don’t care if velocity drops – go fix
it now!!!”
Burn-down::
Release Plan:
CO
MM
ITTE
D
PR
IO
ASA
P
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Fire!
Selected. Dev. Valid. Pending Integration Done!
There should be some kind on control mechanism on Fire QoS, so it doesn’t open the gates of hell to the team
Burn-down::
Release Plan:
CO
MM
ITTE
D
PR
IO
ASA
P
Mwaa-hahaha!!!
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Fire!
Selected. Dev. Valid. Pending Integration Done!
I.E., every Fire request should be audited post-mortem and there should be a limit on how many of them you can
open on a given sprint (that’s why it’s a small lane).
Burn-down::
Release Plan:
CO
MM
ITTE
D
PR
IO
ASA
P Was this really a fire???
No it wasn’t… Time to coach our P.O.
Uh-oh…
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Prio
Fire!
Selected. Dev. Valid. Pending Integration Done!
PRIO lane means “as soon as you finish what you are doing right now, please choose this urgent task”.
Burn-down::
Release Plan:
CO
MM
ITTE
D
ASA
P
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Prio
Fire!
Selected. Dev. Valid. Pending Integration Done!
This is not as disruptive as a Fire, but still introduces some controlled context switching, so it shouldn’t be over-used
by the Product Owner either.
Burn-down::
Release Plan:
CO
MM
ITTE
D
ASA
P
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ASA
P Pr
io
Fire!
Selected. Dev. Valid. Pending Integration Done!
The key words in the asAP QoS definition are “As Possible”, You should do some of those, but only as long as it doesn’t
compromise the Sprint Goal
Burn-down::
Release Plan:
CO
MM
ITTE
D
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ASA
P Pr
io
Fire!
Selected. Dev. Valid. Pending Integration Done!
Soon the Team started to keep a separate Kanban Burndown so they could see if they could invest more on
kanban or not.
Sprint Burn-down:
CO
MM
ITTE
D
Kanban burndown:
Uh-oh, hold the Kanban, guys!!
Mmm…Guess I’d like some Scrum done too…
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Some teams found it difficult to give a story-point estimate to kanban tasks, so they used a different scale (hours, bug
size, kanban points or whatever)
V Scrum V Kanban
80 7500
85 7000
75 8000
70 8500
75 7500
80 7000
? ?
¿Your prediction?
Uuuh… Well, on average we make something like 75 scrum points per sprint. Guess we can commit on that as long as you keep the kanban level safe…
That means somewhere below 7500 kanban points
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This worked like charm. You could even normalize average speeds and add them up, but that’s too much work, and
there’s no real need to do so
Yaaargh! You failed on your commitment!
No, in fact we did a lot more kanban than usual (you over-kanbanized us by 50%, which is quite a lot). It was YOU who told us to prioritize Kanban points during the Sprint and made us fail the sprint goal
That means we’re great and you suck. Maybe we should discuss this with the CEO
!
V Scrum V Kanban
80 7500
85 7000
75 8000
70 8500
75 7500
80 7000
60 11.200
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Just some final advice…
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1) Sustainable pace is about working always towards your
average speed
There’s no use in aiming for top speed every single sprint, except for undermining team’s morale
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Min. V
Max. V
This will be done for sure (boring)
Yougottabekiddin’ me!
We will probably end up somewhere over here (average speed) – a.k.a. “We can do this!”
Backlog and average speed
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2) No tool is foolproof
if your P.O. is opening 25 PRIO Kanban every single day, I’ll give you a clue: the problem is not in the post-it notes brand
you’re using…
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Hope it helps!
I would love to hear about how this is helping you or how could we improve it . Please frop me a line at [email protected]
© 2010 Proyectalis Gestión de Proyectos S.L.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
This presentation is based upon the ideas and work of many people. And while I’ve tried to recognize copyrights and give credit and attribution where possible, I cannot possibly list them all, so if you feel like there’s something that should be added, changed or removed from this presentation, please drop me an e-mail at [email protected]
Special thanks to Henrik Kniberg, on whose article “one day in kanban land” is this presentation inspired. You rock!!
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