Ditching Scrum for Kanban

I talk about our transition from an ad-hoc software development process, to implementing Scrum, and then finally moving to Kanban.

Transcript

1. Ditching SCRUM for KANBAN
2. WHO AM I? ▸ Grant Ammons - VP engineering at PipelineDeals ▸ Scaled From 1 to 12 engineers ▸ @gammons Medium + Twitter
3. WHAT IS PIPELINEDEALS? ▸ Sales CRM software, Web-based, SaaS ▸ Ruby/Rails ▸ Remote engineers ▸ Small (12 dev, 31 employee) long-lived product company ▸ One company, one product.
4. WHO AM I NOT? ▸ A Scrum expert ▸ A Kanban expert ▸ All I have is my experience + story.
5. BEFORE SCRUM
6. OUR NASCENT PROCESS ▸ Detailed wireframes / comps with notes ▸ One developer -> One "project" ▸ Project completed when the comps were "done"
7. PROBLEMS ▸ No shared understanding of architecture ▸ No real QA step ▸ No code reviews ▸ No real UX (we all wore the UX hat) ▸ Right onto the next "project", no follow-through
8. WHAT WE KNEW ▸ Lack of organization ▸ We had QA issues ▸ We needed a better collaborative dev process
10. SCRUM
11. SCRUM ▸ Hired a coach, he came in for an intense 2 day session ▸ Learned Scrum properly. Set up development board.
12. ROLES ▸ 4 Engineers (one of which was mainly QA) ▸ 1 Designer ▸ 1 Scrum master ▸ Shared "product owner" role
13. 3 MONTHS IN ▸ We were much more organized ▸ QA issues were much much better, combo of making time for it + better eng. practices ▸ The shared PO role was bizarre ▸ Will our estimating get better?
14. 12 MONTHS IN ▸ Still shipping high quality software, benefiting from discipline ▸ Got a PM But, Problems. ▸ We were sick of day-long tasking meetings ▸ Estimations were consistent, but still inaccurate ▸ QA problems because of cramming
16. SEEKING ALTERNATIVES
18. KANBAN
19. WHAT IS KANBAN? ▸ Kanban is basically Scrum with the goalposts removed ▸ Continuous flow ▸ Pull system ▸ WIP limits
21. 12 MONTHS IN ▸ Team morale is very high ▸ Very good cadence ▸ Delivery process + QA process is in very good place
22. PITFALLS ▸ Urgency? ▸ No WIP limits?
23. NONE ➡ KANBAN? ▸ No, We needed Scrum discipline first ▸ Kanban prescribes very little
24. YMMV
25. THANKS! @GAMMONS