History and purpose of the Scrumban Framework

Scrumban is a framework for developing, delivering, and maintaining complex products or services. Several organizations have met their needs by combining the Scrum and Kanban approaches. Sometimes, the development team members combine several tools during their work without being aware that they have hired principles or practices of another tool—for example, if a Kanban team meet during the daily standup meeting, which is a Scrum practice. Another example would be if the Scrum team limits the size of their activities per column (queue), which is a Kanban practice.

The function of Scrumban

The official training material of the “Certified Scrumban Practitioner®” contains definitions of roles, events, artifacts, and the overall rules. Corey Ladas first explained the function of Scrumban in 2008. He said that pure timeboxed iterations like Scrum brings no value to well-regulated pull systems like Kanban. And Ajay Reddy wrote about the “Scrumban (R)evolution” during the same year. The primary focus was that Scrumban is more than simple a mixture of Scrum and Kanban. With the “Certified Scrumban Practitioner,” IBQMI shows a mixture of both frameworks and gives examples of how to mix the practices of Scrum and Kanban in an efficient way. The Scrumban practitioner also explains the meaning behind the whole Scrumban discipline.

Uses and purpose of Scrumban
Scrumban is a combination of Scrum and Kanban along with lean (a method for minimizing waste). Scrumban can be used in both the development of products and in their maintenance. Scrumban can also be used for hardware, networks, and operations, as well as for non-IT-functions. Scrumban for software is especially valuable for products, which are within the maintenance phase where only a tiny number of new features are developed or refactored.

Scrumban enhances the capabilities of Scrum.
While Scrum is not explicit, Scrumban tells you what to do regardless of which phase of the transition your team or organization is currently in. Scrum is also often initially overwhelming. Thus, many teams and organizations modify the events or make their own interpretations, ignoring the value of Scrum.
Scrumban is more of a process framework than a “big-bang” framework and is one that works continuously from the initial setup. It is a continuously working framework, helping teams and organizations to come to an agile, which for them could be plain Scrum, plain Kanban, lean, or plain Scrumban.

The IBQMI® Certified Scrumban Practitoner® mission: the relationship between purpose and performance! Enroll in Certified Scrumban Practitoner®