Final Sprint Looks Like Kanban
Last Thursday we had the last planning meeting of this year. In three weeks time, we will deliver the last release of 2009, ready to be put in production on January 1st, 2010 (this 6 week gap is something for another blog).
It feels kind of awkward, to be planning the final set of user stories. Is this really everything? Can we really miss all that other stuff on the product backlog? Everybody is quite confident that we produced good results.
Nonetheless there are some oddities. While things are being tested continuously, any issues uncovered normally entered the product backlog. In this last iteration, if an issue turns out to be more important than stories already planned, we (team + product owner) agreed to reprioritize during the sprint.
This also means that the team is now even more disciplined about how many user stories to develop concurrently, because we don’t want the PO to drop a user story we’ve just started working on.
But… as the number of user stories decreases and the PO is allowed to reprioritize all work that hasn’t started yet, we might as well say that we’re doing Kanban!
As I said in my previous post, “Kanban, Lean and Scrum Are Not Religions…”, it depends on your situation what tool suits you best. For almost a year, we used Scrum. For the end game, Kanban seems like a better tool. Just do what works.
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