Kanban & Scrum

Making the best of both

By: Owais Ashraf
About myself
Director Software Services at Contour Software Pvt. Ltd.
14+ Year of Experience in IT Industry
Operations Management
Business Intelligence Solution Analysis
Agile Project Management
Business Analysis
Software Quality Assurance (ISO 9000 Standards, ISO/IEC 27001, CMMI)
Software Testing

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Company Overview

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Overview
What is Kanban, and how does it compare Scrum?
Where do they complement each other?
Are there any potential conflicts between the two?
Where Kanban is suggested to use?

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Scrum in a nutshell
Split the organization into small teams

Split the work into a list of small, concrete deliverables

Scrum in a nutshell
Split time into short fixed-length iterations

Optimize the release plan and update priorities

Optimize the process by having a retrospective
What Kanban means?
Lean approach to agile software development.
Kanban is a Japanese word that means Visual Card.
At Toyota, Kanban is the term used for the visual & physical signaling system that ties together
the whole Lean Production system.
Most agile methods such as Scrum and XP are already well aligned with lean principles.
Originated by David Anderson in 2004, under the guidance of Don Reinertsen, this evolved into
what David called a Kanban system for software development, and people now simply refer to
as Kanban. So while Kanban as applied to software development is new, Kanban as used in
Lean Production is over a half century old.

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Kanban in a nutshell
Visualize the workflow, split the work in pieces and write each item on a card

Limit Work In Progress (WIP) by assigning explicit limits

Kanban in a nutshell
Measure the lead time, (average time to complete one item)
How do both relate to each other
Scrum & Kanban are Process Tools.
Tool
Process
Compare Tools for understanding, not judgment.
No Tool is complete, No Tool is Perfect.
They just provide some constraints & guidelines.

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Scrum is more prescriptive than Kanban
Agile methods are lightweight methods.
Scrum and Kanban are both highly adaptive

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Roles
Scrum Prescribes Roles

Kanban doesnt Prescribe any Roles

Iterations
Scrum Prescribes Time-boxed Iterations
Beginning of iteration
During iteration
End of iteration
Kanban doesnt Prescribe Time-boxed Iterations
You choose your own
Regular OR On-Demand

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Scrum & Kanban Board
Same Boards, whats the difference?
Scrum Limits WIP per Iteration
Kanban limits WIP per workflow

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Both Limit WIP by different ways

Scrum teams usually measure velocity

How many items (or story points) get done per iteration
KanBan team usually measure lead time/cycle time
Once WIP limits in place, we can start measuring and predicting lead time.

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Both are empirical
Direct Controls, is this possible?

Indirect Controls

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Changes in Scrum and Kanban
What if someone turns up and wants to add E on the board?

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Working Boards
Scrum Board is reset between each Iteration

Kanban Board remain Persistent

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Cross-Functional Teams
Scrum Prescribes Cross Functional Teams

Kanban Prescribes Cross Functional Optional

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Backlog
Both are based on incremental development, i.e. break the work into smaller pieces
Scrum Backlog must fit in a Sprint

Kanban team try to minimize lead time and Level the Flow

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Estimations & Velocity
Scrum Prescribes Estimation & Velocity

In Kanban, estimation is not prescribed

Some teams does, some not
Some teams use velocity, some group in MMFs and measure the Average Lead time to
commit to SLAs.

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Both allow working on multiple products simultaneously
Think of Product Backlog more like a Team Backlog

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Both allow working on multiple products simultaneously
One strategy would be to have the team focus on one product per sprint

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Both allow working on multiple products simultaneously
Another strategy would be to have the team work on features from both
products each sprint

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Both allow working on multiple products simultaneously
We can have several products flowing across the same board.

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Both allow working on multiple products simultaneously

... or by having swimlanes :

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Prioritized backlog
Scrum prescribe Prioritized PBIs
Kanban doesnt Prescribe Prioritized PBIs
you can choose any prioritization scheme (or even none)
Always take the top item.
Always take the oldest item (so each item has a timestamp).
Take any item.
Spend approximately 20% on maintenance items and 80% on
new features.
Split the teams capacity roughly evenly between product A and product B.
Always take red items first, if there are any.

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Daily meetings
Scrum prescribes Daily Standups
People Oriented
Kanban doesnt prescribe Daily Standup
Board Oriented

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Measure Progress
In Scrum, burn down charts are prescribed

Kanban doesnt prescribe any chart

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Which one to pick?
Learn lessons from both models, and adapt them to fit the unique needs of
your organization.

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Summary of Scrum vs. Kanban
Both are Lean and Agile.
Both use pull scheduling.
Both limit WIP.
Both use transparency to drive process improvement.
Both focus on delivering releasable software early and often.
Both are based on self-organizing teams.
Both require breaking the work into pieces.
In both, the release plan is continuously optimized based on Empirical data (velocity /
lead time).

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Questions & Answers
Please go ahead

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