Scrumban

Scrumban Agile Framework, Scrumban history, Scrumban methodology, Scrumban board, Scrum and Kanban hybrid, Scrum ban definition

Scrumban is a hybrid between Scrum and Kanban agile frameworks, that uses the Kanban board to visualize the workflow, the pull system and WIP limits from Kanban, but also uses the Scrum ceremonies and sprint, while keeping the flow of work continuous.

Scrumban history

Scrumban was developed for teams to transition from Scrum to Kanban. Over time, it became popular on its own because of how it combines the positive elements of both Scrum and Kanban to deliver the best results. It joins the prescriptive nature of Scrum and the process improvement capability of Kanban, allowing teams to move closer towards Agile development and to constantly improve their processes. For many software development teams, an immediate shift to Kanban would be too drastic, while Scrumban offers them a way of learning how to practice continuous improvement in Kanban without abandoning the familiar structure of Scrum.

Scrumban – Scrum and Kanban hybrid

Scrumban uses iterations timeboxed to maximum two weeks, during which Scrum ceremonies like Planning, Review and Retrospective are taking place. Planning ceremony’s goal is not to plan and commit work for the sprint, but more to refine and make specific backlog work items meet the Definition of Ready so they will be pulled by the team during the sprint.

Scrumban triggers a planning ceremony when the backlog of work items ready to be worked on gets to be very small because of the pull system. Kanban key metrics cycle time, lead time and throughput play a big role also in Scrumban, because they trigger the inspect and adapt events where the team inspects its performance and looks for bottlenecks in the continuous flow of work. In Scrumban there are no specific roles and also there is no specific limitation on the number of team members.


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Agile frameworks