Carl Sjoeberg

Kanban proposal International teams @ Etsy Scrum limitations with research driven work Research estimation Velocity not as helpful Research driven work makes it difficult to estimate stories since the scope is often not known at the time of sprint planning and/or backlog refinement. Due to the unknown nature of the work the velocity is not very straightforward and hard to use as a planning tool for sprint planning and project forecasting. Kanban limitations No defined time period No retrospectives Removing the 2 week cadance can demotivate teams if the team is not engaged or mature enough. Process improvement is not built in to the framework as it is in Scrum with bi weekly retrospectives with follow up action items Mitigating limitations Demos Improvements Backlog Mgmt Let’s discuss if we should have a bi-weekly or a weekly demos scheduled for the whole team and any stakeholder that would be interested Let’s discuss if we want to schedule meetings to review of how the week went, how the current flow is working and also take a look at WIP metrics. Similar to scrum the backlog needs to be up to date and actively refined and managed in a Kanban approach. Work In Progress (WIP) Limits Pull based approach to ongoing work based on available resources There are 2 main principles of Kanban: Limit WIP and Manage Flow The purpose of WIP limits is to avoid bottlenecks and assure flow. Here is an example of a simple kanban board with WIP limits defined based on team size There are a couple of ways to monitor flow. We might want to monitor cycle time to start with. Weighted Shortest Job First - WSJF WSJF = Cost of Delay -----------------------------Job Duration (Size) Establish a mindset where cost of delay is part of the prioritization process on a ongoing basis There are a couple of things that the team needs to agree on: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● Definition of done Relative sizing Columns for the board WIP limits Story card movements and sign off Create new JIRA Project Backlog review to identify relevant tickets to move over