What Is Scrumban?

Introduction

Scrumban is a hybrid of Scrum and Kanban. It combines the project management and product delivery focus of Scrum with the pull systems, workflow visualization, and process improvement of Kanban. According to the 2018 State of Agile report [1], 8% of software teams report that they are using Scrumban. Teams that implement Scrumban effectively combine the product delivery of Scrum with the process improvement and workflow management of Kanban to reap the rewards of both. Scrumban helps teams take their ability to deliver valuable products to the next level.

Scrum is the most popular Agile methodology, or framework, and many teams either use parts of Scrum or have considered doing so. However, even highly effective Scrum teams find that the rules of Scrum are not always enough to help them get past their particular challenges. For example, a Scrum team might find that it doesn’t have the capacity to handle all of the ideas requested by its stakeholders, so even though the team is working at full speed, the “prebacklog” of ideas keeps growing, causing frustration among the stakeholders. For teams that are already using Scrum, adopting Scrumban will give them a method for finding and fixing those problems that cause their teams to be overloaded.

With the popularity of Kanban board features in electronic tools like JIRA, software teams are increasingly aware of Kanban. But many teams that adopt those tools face very common misconceptions: they treat Kanban ...