is good…

Neal ChampionApplication Development Consultant, Microsoft

…but Kanban is better

My Perspective• Based on personal experience – yours may differ • There are no right answers• Most significant impact of Agile is retrospection• Agile is mostly a cultural revolution• Culture is complex• Slow to change• Difficult to measure

Team I learnt this with

Background of Scrum

•Around since the mid-90s•Gateway drug to Agile• Easy to understand• Easy to implement• It works!•Has almost become synonymous with Agile•…but it’s not perfect

Problems we found with Scrum

• Sprint Planning Hell• Squeezed Testing• Stories not completing in Sprint

Sprint Planning Hell

Sprint Planning Hell

•Developers unhappy to commit or estimate until they understand :• Detail of Requirements• Technical solution

• Sprint Planning became:• Requirements Analysis • Design Meeting

Squeezed Testing

Squeezed Testing

• Testing cannot happen until the code is written• Any earlier overrun squeezes testers out the back of

the sprint• Testers get the blame when stories aren’t ready

Story Overrun• Symptom of previous issues• Analysis and Design squeezed out of the front• Testing squeezed out of the back• Sprint just became development• Carried-over Stories make Sprint Velocity harder to

measure

Root Causes• Scrum does not differentiate between individuals’

skillsets• Scrum doesn’t acknowledge dependencies between

tasks

Scrum Board

From http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2117898&seqNum=7

Our First Kanban Flow

•Acknowledgement that each story at least requires:• Analysis & Design – which we called Elaboration• Coding• Testing

Our Kanban Board

A Word about WIP

•Work in Progress (WIP) should be limited• “Stop starting, start finishing”• Incomplete work is “wasted inventory”•Multi-tasking is bad!

Multi-Tasking Exercise• 1• 2• 3• 4• 5• 6• 7• 8• 9• 10

• A• B• C• D• E• F• G• H• I• J

• I• II• III• IV• V• VI• VII• VIII• IX• X

Definition of Done

• Scrum often has a Definition of Done for a whole story•With Kanban, we had a DoD for each step in the process

Elaborate• High level

design• Acceptance

Test Criteria

Dev• Feature

complete• Unit tests met• Peer reviewed

Test• Acceptance

Test Criteria met

• NFT reqts met

Review• Business

Reqts met

#NoEstimates !!!

The Estimation Holy Wars

• Estimating is a divisive topic!•We sized stories on the backlog in simply T-

shirt sizes• Following the Elaboration phase, we knew

more, and re-estimated, using points

Valuing Stories

Prioritising Stories

What we found

•Coped better with variable story size•Coped better with urgent work - bug fixes,

production issues• Elimination of Sprints allowed everyone to work

continuously

Fit with Continuous Delivery

•Scrum is a batch process•Kanban is a continuous process

Questions?