The Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams aims to help Scrum Teams leverage the ideas and practices of Flow and Kanban in a way that is coherent with Scrum as defined by the Scrum Guide.
The first release of the guide has been well received. Most of the feedback we've gotten centered around the need to tighten it up around some of the concepts. We also noticed that some key concepts weren't covered well enough in the guide and we wrote some additional materials to support it.
So, when working on a new revision for the guide, Our main goal was to improve clarity and organization. We’ve refined some concepts and brought in a few topics previously covered in addendums and additional materials. Some examples and specifics were actually removed in the spirit of "tightening" and keeping the guide from being too prescriptive.
Here are some of the specific changes:
- We revamped the Theory section to make clearer connections between flow and empiricism and to introduce flow metrics and Little’s Law.
- We cleaned-up of the definition of workflow section that moved some examples into the Kanban practices themselves.
- We generalized some of the policies to reduce the level of prescription and focus more on the principles.
- We clarified the discussion about the scope of visualization and accountability around defining the definition of “Workflow".
- We added a section about how the increment is affected by the flow.
- We moved SLE into the active management of workflow section.
It was a pleasure to collaborate on this revision with Daniel (Vacanti), Steve (Porter) and our awesome reviewers - Louis-Philippe Carignan, Charles Bradley, Jose Casal, Andy Hiles and Jesse Houwing.
Also new this time around are translations – The guide is now available in English, French, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian with 8 more translations underway. These are high quality translations performed by Scrum with Kanban practitioners – Thank you to our translators team!