Developing and Delivering Products Professionally [P3]: Optimizing Flow - AFH 108: Professional Scrum with Kanban – Yuval Yeret

Question 1

Teams missing kanban are missing what?

Answer 1

flow - leads to useless discussion, waste

Question 2

What is the heart of scrum?

Answer 2

• empericism
  
  • how quickly do you get through that loop
  • function of your cycle times - start to finish (get feedback, deploy)

Question 3

What is the best metric for a team to start out with when beginning to incorporate Kanban with Scrum?

Answer 3

cycle is the best metric to start with - define with for the team

Question 4

What a green flags that the team is doing Scrum well?

Answer 4

• breaking down stuff really well - see flow clearly
• only pulling work in that they can actually work on - pull system
• reliable WIP limit

Question 5

Flow via kanban doesn’t happen naturally. What needs to happen?

Answer 5

SM needs to understand flow and improve team’s flow

Question 6

When looking at the duration metric, what needs to happen if we notice that something keeps being stuck in progress?

Answer 6

reflect in retro and daily scrum

Question 7

Explain Little’s law from Yuval Yeret’s POV

Answer 7

• cycle time = work in progress / throughput
• changing one thing impacts something else e.g. reducing WIP will probably improve your cycle time
• looking at boundaries before and after a sprint tool
• most important - assumptions that have to hold true in your system of work for this equation to be accurate
• if you can hold those assumptions true - law can help optimise your sprint and it gives you a set of things you have to work towards
  
  • e.g. if team size stays the same and you drop WIP by factor of 3 then your cycle time will increase by a factor of 3
  • BUT depends on context - if working in a kitchen and you have 3 people working on a dish rather than one, your cycle time probably won’t increase due to the overlap of people - need to be aware of the assumption of the architecture of system i.e. kitchen is big enough
• If system is changing, assumptions won’t hold true for the cycle time
  
  • taking on flow debt - saying yes to our clients to keep them interested but that means that it is harder for us to give them good service

Question 8

If you want to start using Kanban with Scrum, where should you start, according to Yuval Yeret?

Answer 8

• stop using burndown chart for short sprint
• have someway to look in the flow - set up kanban board
  
  • stages
  • streams
• if see lots of cards moving all together - add constraints per column
  
  • green dot each times it moves a day
  • red dot each time it doesn’t move a day
• WIP limits - most important tools - guide us to adapt
• Kanban + scrum - new movement
  
  • optimising flow rather than burndowns