#27 – CFD

Authors comment:

Extending Scrum with Kanban principles and techniques (popularly called Scrumban) can increase the level of self-inspection that the team can do. Using Kanban principles and techniques, like creating a Cumulative Flow Diagram on the stages of the Scrum Board, gives an increased insight into different aspects of the team’s work and how different parameters evolve over time: the number of concurrent stories in each stage (Work-In-Progress), the time a story stays in each “phase” (activity time), the full time it takes for the team to deliver PBIs (lead time), etc.

When we have this overview, and assuming that the size of the stories don’t vary significantly, the answers to mitigate these situations can seem straight-forward; if the WIP of the implementing stage is high, initiate actions so that the team can swarm better and introduce WIP limits. If the cycle time is high, a root cause could be that stories get frequently blocked. If the lead time is high, maybe the team has trouble getting stories accepted by the PO or needs to do more up-front refinement before the sprint.