1. No way, they are opposites: Kanban is for flow / Scrum batch
2. Yes, Scrum is old school big planning steps
3. Yes, Kanban minimal planning / Scrum is heavy planning
4. No, Scrum can reduce to KanBan

As much as we love scrum, even we would have to admit that it’s not perfect

. Nothing is.  In  fact, a  large part of our book describes workarounds  for various deficiencies that scrum presents to us in certain circumstances.

One of the more commonly noted deficiencies in scrum is that it plans its work a whole Sprint at a  time.   This “batch” planning process  is often not agile enough  to cope with the actual rate of change of requirements.    In fact, Chapter 4.4 on PlaceHolder Stories, the  discussion  of  the  mid-Sprint  Re-planning  in  Chapter  4.8,  and  the  discussion  of renegotiating the scope of a Sprint in Chapter 4.3 are all about resolving this deficiency.

There  is  another  agile  process,  called  KanBan,  which  solves  this  problem  and  is becoming popular  for  software development projects.  In our upcoming book we will describe the main strength of KanBan and how to integrate it into scrum.

Brief Description of KanBan

The  “KanBan  for  software” movement  is  really gaining some  traction  in  the  agile  community.    The main  idea  of  KanBan  is  very  simple  and based  on  the  Lean  “pull,”  “Just  in  Time”  (JIT),  and  “reduce  inventory”  principles:  eliminate planning inventory by making sure that you don’t commit to doing work until you are actually ready to start the work.

1. A placeholder story is a sign of sloppy planning
2. All work should be known ahead of time and planned during sprint planning
3. Yes, this allows the Product Owner to dump things into the sprint as needed.
4. Sometimes we have a history of unexpected bugs/issues of handle it now. This allows us to track how much of that is showing up and leave some slack for when it does.
5. We often have work we know we will have to do but, don’t know what it is yet.

Comment: This is a way to track how much unknown work is showing up and manage the amount by triggering a conversation when needed. One of the most common issues for scrum teams is what to do about work that we expect to have to do during a Sprint, but don’t actually know the details about yet, such as bugs we have to fix in existing systems, or expected sales support efforts. Using Place holder stories is a a method to manage these “known unknowns”.

Choose

1. The development team creates a spec.
2. The Product Owner says it is.
3. The business asks for it.
4. There is a test which actually requires it to be there and fails when it is not.

Comment: We often find ourselves lost in the desirements trying to find the real requirements for our system. Those things which seem required often end up being only desired. The word requirement has suffered more from confusion and misuse than just about any other word in the IT lexicon of development. What is a “nice to have” requirement? I mean really! I have close to 20 years of experience in the industry including training and writing requirements. Even with all of that experience the word still makes me a little crazy. I like the word desirement because of it’s contrast with requirement. When there is a test that makes it required with a pass/fail then it is a requirement, until then it’s just a a desirement.

So, a more interesting question is …. When is a requirement truly required?

1. The PO says go.
2. The Teams says they are ready.
3. The SM has determined a time box for the sprint.
4. The team and PO agree to a time box
5. The PO understands and is prepared to talk about the stories

Comment: There are a number of things you should do before you can even begin planning.  The most important thing you can do is make sure that your Product Owner is prepared, and understands what the stories are about.  Remember that the Product Owner is a role here, so what we’re actually saying is that someone on the Team knows about each story; that is, each story has its own champion (Story Owner) who represents the Stakeholder’s needs/wants to the Team. This may require that the Product Owner (person) coordinates the efforts of all the Story Owners.

Comment: After a Story is committed to, the Team (with the PO in the lead) has the option to reprioritize the Story list, and the Team takes the next one to consider. Once again, the Team comes to the “doneness” Agreement and commits to adding the Story to the list of already-committed-to Stories. This process is repeated until the Sprint is “full” and the Sprint Plan is complete.

Comment: The Team may not be able to commit to a story, or might noteven be able to agree on “done.” This makes the story in question is an epic, by definition, and the Team must decide what to do. Typical choices include committing to an Analysis Story to figure out what to do about the epic, or extracting a smaller story from the epic to do instead (putting the remainder back on the backlog), or skipping the story altogether and moving to the next one. Bottom line: We need a sense of movement to understand what the team can and cannot do. Biting off chunks of work that are too large obscures movement and makes throughput / velocity that much harder to understand. Use the team’s ability to commit to understand the work that the  story represents.

Comment: Changes to work forms an interesting tension.  At a fine grained detailed level it changes all the time. Each person’s individual to-dos often change to reflect their understanding of what it takes to get the job done. As the level of granularity increases to task then it is a change to the team’s plan. If the number of changes is significant and adds up to more than one story’s worth of work then you better stop and adjust your plan, usually you want the product owner in on that discussion. And if there are several new  stories that were  suddenly found and are so important they must be done right now, then call a stop and reset your entire sprint with a sprint planning session. Generally, the commitment by the team to the sprint should not change. Note: definition of team makes this an interesting discussion. Bottom Line: The goal here is to help the team get better at  expressing work they can do and following through on a commitment.

Yes, the process will take care of itself we don’t need to watch it that closely. After all, it’s common sense!

Comment: Of things to watch out for and not allow this is high on my  list.  It boils down to this rule: If the team is not doing a retrospective then they are not doing scrum. The retrospective is where the team takes formal ownership of their process. In these situations I crack shins, and kick knee caps and generally do what is necessary to ensure they continue doing a retrospective. Without that we often see teams fall into “it’s not my fault”  because “x” told me to. In some cases “x” is the process that no-one owns, imagine the process that gets created by someone who decides to own it but, does not do it themselves!.

Retrospective is an external constraint that must be demanded of the team. There are many ways to run a good retrospective, ScrumMaster rise to the challenge and support your team.

Comment: The conversation here is about setting a time-box and sticking to it. Failing to adhere to the time boxes for your sprint is a bad habit. Without time-boxes we rapidly loose our sense of predictability and the amount of complexity we tackle in each bite drifts upward. Teams become fragmented and loose cohesion.

When would you not time box your sprint?

Comment: The idea here is that there can be only one source for Scrum knowledge. I guess that depends on where you get your definition from and what you need. Should there be only one way to think about scrum? Probably not, although,  a rookie mistake is to modify without have deep applied practice and experience under your belt. The 1st common mistake we see people make is modifying scrum without understanding it. They often confuse themselves and their organization.