Scrum and Kaban are two Agile approaches that could be used in software development, depending also on the context of the software development tools. In his blog post “Ditching Scrum for Kanban — The best decision we’ve made as a team”, Grant Ammons shares some thought on why he successfully changed it process from a Scrum to a Kanban perspective.
The software development team managed by Grant Ammons first decided to start using Scrum to implement more discipline in its process. Scrum brought some benefits to the team as they start writing light specs and more cooperating with a product manager. The team liked the stand-ups and grooming sessions that kept everyone aligned on the work. The retrospectives also helped adapting the process to the team needs and improving it.
However, there were soon also some issues with Scrum. The main one was that it was very hard to plan two weeks of work accurately . The team was mainly overestimating the amount of work it could achieve, which lead to carrying over tasks from the previous sprint to the current one. This was hurting the morale. This is why the team switched to Kaban and removed the sprint goals. This improved the morale and didn’t hurt the team capacity to deliver. Grant Ammons wrote as a main point “It turns out that cramming to make sprint deadlines was not the major motivating factor to get work done.”
The conclusion of the blog post is that “Kanban works well for our team and our company. It has also worked for other companies as well. Perhaps Kanban is better suited towards long-lived product development than Scrum. Perhaps there is indeed a natural progression of engineering teams adopting Scrum, then moving to Kanban. From my standpoint we were struggling with Scrum and are Thriving with Kanban. It’s the best decision we have made as a team.”
Read the full blog post on https://medium.com/cto-school/ditching-scrum-for-kanban-the-best-decision-we-ve-made-as-a-team-cd1167014a6f#