Scrum has become the most widely accepted agile development methodology throughout industry. As it has gained popularity teams are analyzing the pros and cons of Scrum.With the help of Mary and Tom Poppendieck’s Lean Software Development, my team has identified the following deficiencies in Scrum:
* WAITING
* PARTIALLY DONE WORK
* TASK SWITCHING
* EXTRA PROCESSES

1) WAITING
Our team had a two week development sprint ending on Thursdays. On the Wednesday prior to the sprint end date we would have a code freeze. Thursdays were used to test the code and Friday’s were spent demoing the product and planning for the next sprint.

In theory this sounds great. But in practice I found software developers are not great testers. Developers found themselves sitting on their hands WASTING most of this time WAITING for new coding tasks.

2) PARTIALLY DONE WORK
Throughout each sprint our team would have many tasks in the “In Progress” section of our task board. Each task would be 80% done, but NONE of them would be 100% done.

3) TASK SWITCHING
Since we had a lot of work “In Progress” team members were constantly working multiple items at once. A lot of time was wasted while a developer would switch from one task to another. Each task switch required the developer to recall what the task inquired and re-learning the code during each switch.

4) EXTRA PROCESS
Each developer had a different definition of what it meant to be DONE. We found inconsistencies in the steps each developer took to complete a task. Some steps were not needed.

KANBAN
As we researched how to solve these issues we stumbled upon Kanban. Kanban is a lean software development methodology that helped us address the issues described above.

In subsequent posts I will describe Kanban in more detail and how we went from Scrum to Scrumban (a Scrum/Kanban hybrid) to Kanban.