Scrum(Kan)ban at Blue Yonder

Talk given at the meetup of the Limited WiP Society Karlsruhe, Germany. The talk is about Scrum, Kanban and the transitions between the two grounded in practical experience.

Transcript

1. Dr. Manuel Bähr | @manuelbahr
   Head of Platform
   Scrum(Kan)ban at Blue Yonder
   

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2. Leading SaaS
   provider of predictive
   applications in retail.
   2
   

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3. Decisions beat
   insights, any time.
   Prof. Dr. Michael Feindt - Founder of Blue Yonder
   

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4. Supply Chain Pricing Marketing
   Predictive Applications for Retail
   

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5. Our Customers
   

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6. Blue Yonder grew from 30 to 150 people in the period
   2011-2015
   Still not a large corporation and thank god no
   bureaucracy.
   Highly dynamic market situation (big data & analytics)
   I am talking about long-term product development
   Context
   6
   

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7. Our Agile Journey
   2014
   Stopped doing fixed-time
   iterations as an experiment.
   2008
   Creative chaos.
   2011
   Established
   Scrum in one
   team.
   2013
   Somehow ended
   up with
   component teams.
   2015
   Re-org to group teams
   around products and not
   components.
   2012
   More teams
   using Scrum.
   

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8. Inspect the
   Transitions
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9. Chaos vs Scrum
   Introduction of Scrum felt hugely
   effective due to the alignment of
   individuals and focus on the customer
   

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10. Combined Scrum with strong
    engineering practices
    Continuous Integration, Clean Code,
    zero bug policy, code review, design
    review …
    Scrum offers no protection otherwise

    

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11. Scrum vs Kanban - Starting Point
    Experienced no (need for) long-term predictability in Scrum
    Frustration on failure to reach sprint goal vs pressure to cut on
    quality towards sprint end
    In-sprint reviews and releases to achieve continuous delivery
    Activities around sprint planning are not adding value
    

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12. Scrum vs Kanban - The Change
    Removed fixed iterations
    Story Review and estimation on demand
    One Kanban Board for Stories one for Tasks
    Keep everything else (Retro, Daily, Backlog …)
    

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13. All stages except „In Progress“ are just waiting queues.
    Limit these to reduce waste.
    Limit „In Progress“ to improve cycle time
    WiP Limits
    13
    

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14. Developers don’t want to go back!
    Higher release frequency possible
    Limiting the backlog is hard, but valuable
    Sprint Planning time invested in story refinement
    Purpose of estimation reduced to reveal conflicting
    interpretations of a story
    Scrum vs Kanban - Results
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15. Evolved into a set of component teams (scrum, kanban)
    Typical problems emerged (Watch a Craig Larman talk!)
    But what is the alternative? Feature teams?
    Team members are either specialists or generalists. Why
    support only one type?
    Scaling - Starting Point
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16. Dev team size limited in Scrum
    Due to fundamental rules?
    In Kanban mode only the daily stand-up and
    retrospective require all team members
    Scaling - Team Size
    16
    

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17. 23 people in 3 component teams switched to 2 product
    teams with Kanban mode + Scrum practices
    Single backlog for each product
    Refinement and story review on demand. Estimation in
    T-Shirt sizes
    Feature areas of the product established to group stories
    around topics and not components
    Scaling - The Change
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18. + Very small loss in throughput during the change
    - Cooperation between component devs not enforced
    (like in feature teams). Potentially delayed team
    formation?
    + Developers are generally happy after the change
    + Priorities don’t stop at artifact borders
    + Cross component work happens
    Decision making in large groups is hard. Be it several
    feature teams or a single large team.
    Scaling - Results
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