up one level
---
2017-02-28
Thoughts After Having Skimmed Through Kanban and Scrum Book
By w̶i̶e̶l̶d̶l̶i̶n̶u̶x̶.̶c̶o̶m̶ author Morgan Jassen
I recently encountered this book: "Kanban and Scrum - Making the Most of Both" http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/kanban-scrum-minibook.
(As of this writing, the electronic version is free for download at that web address!)
Some thoughts on it:
I read through the table of contents and the first few pages, and then skimmed the first feew chapters. The ideas on kanban indeed reminded me of the same ideas I had heard a few years back in a DevOps podcast ( I Believe it was DevOps Cafe, if I recall, it was this episode: "DevOps Cafe Episode 30" http://devopscafe.org/show/2012/6/13/devops-cafe-episode-30.html )
In the book, the ideas I'm seeing on scrum also remind me of the sprints that the WordPress.org core developers team is doing -- in the way that they define what can be done on a sprint, and set a date, and iterate; progressing, adding, and removing to-do items from the sprint goal list so as to (usually) deliver the software updates on-time.
On page 44 of the book, the section called "One day in Kanban-land", I enjoyed the cartoon-like story of a scenario implementing kanban. The figures in the story on that page and on the following page described, in an animated way, how the team handles tasks and how the team works together under kanban principles. It is wonderful to see in the animation an example how one team member gets blocked on the deployment phase and that triggers the other two teams to realize that a hold flag has come up and causes them to stop work and go check up to help the blocked team member! I get it that this is how it is supposed to work!
I like how the book repeatedly stresses that kanban and scrum can be effective, but in the end are still merely tools. It's stressed that they are tools that need to be adapted to the software development project at hand, in order for value to be gained from their use.
I'm bookmarking the rest of book for when I need to revisit it and learn more details of the agile principles of scrum and kanban.
In conclusion, from skimming through the Kanban and Scrum book, I learned a bit about how kanban can work to bring teams together to focus on getting tasks done as a team, and also learned a bit about how to treat kanban and scrum as software developer tools.
[2019-03-11 edit: Moved to: https://i̶n̶v̶e̶s̶t̶o̶r̶w̶o̶r̶k̶e̶r̶.̶c̶o̶m̶/2017/... .html.]