I recently went to dev teach Montréal 2011 and read a lot about agility and what came out recently as more and more emergent is discussions regarding Scrum VS Kanban and other software engineering best practices and toolboxes. Scrum is being seen as a revolution that is not always suitable in all context (strong hierarchy company, maintenance project, …) while Kanban is seen as a continuous flow methodology seen more as an evolutionary approach more easy to implement and best suited for maintenance. We also see emerge combinations of both methods.

What experts say?

Here’s a mind map of the notes I took at Joel Semeniuk’s conference at devteach Montréal 2011. He his a Microsoft Regional President, MVP, CSM and CSP.

On my side, I had the chance to work in a real Scrum process and some of the nice benefits of it rely on the fact that you obtain a motivated and united team that have clear goals and liberty to achieve them in the most efficient way they found for their context. Scrum have clear and simple artifacts and ceremonies to follow to continuously improve the process, ensure everyone is in sync, obtain feedback from the client and understand what need to be done. Although I have seen Scrum struggle with maintenance project and bug fixing, since issues often need to be solved right away and can’t wait the next iteration even if it will disturb the team it’s most of the time really urgent. This presentation talks about an interesting way to combine both of them and I would like to test it and see it work for real to see the challenges and outcomes of that method.

Questions:

• What do you think is coming in software engineering best practices?
• How could we combine Scrum and Kanban successfully?