Scrumban: An Agile Integration of Scrum and Kanban in Software Engineering

Abstract

Software Engineering (SE) technologies are emerging day by day and seeking ABPR (Agile Business Process Reengineering) for Software Engineering Management (SEM) frameworks in software development organizations. BPR can enable organizational capabilities to initiate and implement critical change in execution. Under the roof of agile and on the base of empiricism, the Scrum has been proven itself as an ABPR approach for software engineering management in the software development organizations, across the world, by improving productivity, self-organization and collaboration for standard software development processes. Scrum has been leading software project development practices using its own characteristics: Artifacts, Pillars, Values, Events and Roles. But still software project development organizations are facing some issues with their software project development and management processes, like no documentation policy which results into inaccurate estimation, internal states of each work item flowing through the Scrum Board, Sprint tracker and prediction towards goal achievement which can be considered as challenges for Scrum due its limitations as well as Scrum does not allow, any alteration in its rules. Such issues have raised a question against implementation of Scrum and have opened the door for the next level of research to answer the question, how to overcome the limitations of Scrum. Kanban can provide the solution to some of these issues but it can’t provide complete SEM solutions to software Development Organizations. The aim of this research study is empirical analysis about how the formation of hybrid framework Scrumban as an integration of Scrum with Kanban, can resolve challenges of Scrum; using literature reviews, case study reviews, and research surveys; and this research has proposed a conceptual customized Scrumban framework, by keeping Kanban in the center of customization under the bound of Scrum rules. This research also concludes limitations of Scrumban, like project documentation, planning, large scaled project, distributed environment, team capabilities etc.; as each method has its own limitations.