When the developers had to replace Scrum to Kanban (Scrumban)

Scrum is the typical methodology for developer teams. But sometimes the Kanban (Scrumban) fits better. This article is about my story.

This article is a part of my Scrum series, see with free links (including to this article):
I like Scrum. The good Scrum.

I worked on a painfully bad devops project, where the chaos was a better argument for the management, than the predictability. The management (including the main Product Owner) could not handle the partnership with the customers well, because of lack of PO’s technical and management competence.

Sometimes, because of a new customer requirement, we had to stop any development and start a new feature in the middle of a Sprint. It happened more and more often, for example 2 times in a Sprint. When we asked the reasons for this kind of immediate change, the standard answer was “I could not say to the customer something other than yes”. The problem was, there were more customers with different expectations at different dates. The typical conflict resolution was dropping the current and starting a new development as the last customer requirement arrived.

A few managers landed at this project from an acquired company, which was in trouble, because of they preferred the short-term interests…