Kanban or scrum for a small product team with multiple projects

[Linh Pham_Ricksoft_Inc]

Hi everyone! 

We recently reviewed project management approaches for our small product team to determine if we can improve our processes. The two methods considered were Kanban and Scrum, as they are also the project types supported in Jira. We've been using Kanban for a long time, and now we're considering a hybrid approach, combining the visual aspects and continuous flow of Kanban with selected elements from Scrum.

We would like to gather feedback and recommendations from the community. Have you used Kanban, Scrum or hybrid for a small team setting? What were your experiences? 

We value your input and appreciate any advice or recommendations you can provide. Thank you!

[Hieu]

Hi Linh, in the past, my team already used hybrid mode Scrum + Kanban.

If your team has received the product/system from the other team: 

1. Product/system have many bugs + bugs hard to get the correct estimation due to: business understanding, unforeseen case... 
-> Kanban for bugs fixed
2. Product/system still needs to release with the new features
-> Scrum for features

We can split the time of Kanban is 50% and Scrum is 50% in a sprint.
The split time is based on bugs status, if the amount of bugs reduce we can consider reducing the time for Kanban to increase feature development in Scrum.

On the other days, your team has more knowledge about the product/system then they can give the correct estimation for bugs fixed -> remove Kanban from the sprint -> 100% Scrum

Side effects when using this mode:
- Sprint report not correct
- Feature release will slowdown
Advance:
- Team can easily work with project/system
- Gain knowledge rapidly from bugs fixed (should have technical/business sharing for every team member in each sprint)
Key point:
- Keep team members stable when working with this mode
- Do the documents carefully

[Linh Pham_Ricksoft_Inc]

@Hieu  Thank you for the awesome insight! The environment you described above is very close to our situation, except instead of bugs, we have lots of non-dev tasks (mostly ad-hoc). That's why it's difficult to estimate in the traditional Scrum setting.

We take advantage of the scrum backlog prioritization method as opposed to the pull-based system in Kanban. That's pretty much our experience with hybrid approach :)

[Amanda Barber]

We do Scrumban/Kanplan - all these catchy names! :-D 

Here's a great resource: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/kanban/kanplan

My team doesn't actually do sprint planning, but we do daily standups, retrospectives, and a variety of other more Agile things for our processes. We love Kanban for the flexibility and we also love not spending hours in planning meetings each month!