A Peek Inside Agile: Understanding Scrum & Kanban

Editor's Notes

• #17: When asked “Did your project succeed?” – of 50,000 projects, less than 1 in 3 were “successful” based on the criteria of “on time, on budget, with the requested functionality.” Nearly 1 in 5 were flat-out failures and were canceled/never implemented.Over ½ were “challenged” in some way. For those that were late in delivery, the median shows that they took twice as long as estimated (100% OVER the estimated time). For those that were over budget, the median shows they cost 1.5x as much as budgeted. Most projects fell into one or more of 4 reasons cited as resulting in projects not delivering “as expected:” Late, Over Budget, Lacking Functionality, Low Quality
• #25: ** Notebook Question 11-12Epicyclic:Consisting of nested cycles. Scrum, XP, and CBPM are epicyclic. These processes are used for environments where uncertainty about requirements and effort is high, and especially when useful production capabilities can be delivered incrementally.Summarize different phases and cycles.Inception: Includes startup work that must be done before the specified process can start. Inception occurs when starting a new product or service from scratch. It is not a part of the (iterative) work of creating multiple releases of a product over time. Vision: Define concept for product.Roadmap: Long term plan, for one to a few years. Includes major milestones at a summary level, and spans multiple Releases or Projects.Release or Project:A medium-term (weeks to months) span of time, at the end of which results are delivered to customers. Includes fine- to medium-grained specifications of product functionality.Iteration: A short term (1-6 weeks) period spent developing functionality, for which all requirements are fine-grained and directly implementable in this span of time without further decomposition.Day: A single day may have any activities, as required, and involves fluid and dynamic collaboration among Team members to get work done.Termination: This refers to all activities associated with shutting down a Project. It is the same thing as the PMI Closing Process Group.====Note: Inception and Termination are rare occurrences in agile / Scrum projects, because the default mode of working is to continue adding capabilities and deliverables to an existing set, not to start and finish distinct projects frequently.
• #26: ** Notebook Question 4Most agile processes include planning, but not all. The most popular agile process is Scrum, which is an iterative process that divides the calendar into short iterations called Sprints. In each Sprint, a Team starts and finishes implementation and testing of several small requirements. Scrum is not tied to any industry, and can be used for any project for which its characteristics are well-suited.Scrum is used in environments where plan-driven processes are inappropriate, because they have high uncertainty around requirements and effort which make plan-driven schedules unreliable. Instead of defining scope and estimating schedule, Scrum defines schedule (such as a Sprint) and estimates the scope that fits into it. Scrum optimizes risk mitigation (through completing work quickly) over efficiency.A Scrum process does not have planning and execution phases. Planning (for future Sprints) is done in parallel with implementation work (in the present Sprint).
• #27: Kanban omits planning, and focuses on prioritization, tracking, and optimizing throughput. It is commonly employed in production support, Information Technology departments, hospital Emergency Rooms (as “triage”), and in any environment where work items are not known in advance.Kanban originated in manufacturing, and was adapted for software development. “Kanban” is a Japanese word meaning “signboard,” and in manufacturing refers to a signal indicating that some action should be performed. The use of signals to request action is consistent with the “pull” nature of projects or processes in which Kanban is generally employed.A Kanban project has no phases associated with starting or ending a project. All work is handled the same way, as tasks that flow through states.
• #33: Story A2 depends on Milestone1, which occurs early in Sprint 1. A2 starts in Sprint 1, after Milestone1.Task1 depends on A1, starts in Sprint 2 after A2 completesMilestone2 depends on Task1, occurs in Sprint 2. B5 depends on Milestone2, but can’t start until Sprint 3.A3 depends on B2, starts in Sprint 2 after B2 is completeDependent pieces of projects are timed to release together at the end of Sprint 3.