crumban — The unwanted Child

Is Scrumban the unwanted child of Scrum and Kanban?

Cover Art by Author

Introduction

You are probably familiar with Scrum & Kanban. So what is Scrumban? It is an agile project management theory, just like Scrum and Kanban. Scrumban, however, combines them both, that’s why the name is also a combination. It was developed to switch an already Scrum living team to Kanban and work with lean methodologies since Scrum has a lot of overhead. If Scrum is not applied right, the complete process of Scrum is an empty shell.

Also, Scrum can degenerate into a highly overrated tool that generates more effort than benefit at a certain development stage of the product in development. For example, when a product has been well received by customers and the focus of the team lies on updates & maintenance instead of new features.

If you aren’t familiar with Scrum or Kanban, I introduce them shortly in this article, but I recommend you to read the detailed article.

Back to topic: Scrumban combines the flow-based methods of Scrum and the visualization of Kanban. Teams have the agility of Scrum and benefit from the simplicity of Kanban. Thus without requiring role updates.

Scrum, in Short, 4–3–3 Rule