Scrumban - Knowing the BTTWON

BTTWON stands for the Best Thing To Work on Next and I'm surprised that no-one has coined the acronym before this. Show me a team where each team member can determine their BTTWON over the course of a project without needing to consult a manager, and I'll show you an efficient team.

This leads me to Scrumban which, I hope I'm not missing the point, seems to have an underlying goal of making it easy for team members to determine their BTTWON. Inspired by this idea I've decided to dive head first into Scrumban in 2014.

Scrumban takes ideas from the the Scrum approach and applies Kanban "pull" principles to them. I'm vaguely familiar with both methodologies, having worked on one project that used the Scrum approach and then loosely following ideas from Kanban for most of 2013. Scrumban seems to be a refinement that builds on the two others and I'm looking forward to experimenting with it.

The tools and methodologies

The overall goal is to settle on a process for managing software development and integration projects and it looks like we'll be building a hybrid based on a few sources of influence. The first is a blog post on using Trello and Google Docs by +Richard White at User Voice, the second is a useful project resource allocation spreadsheet borrowed from the Penelope project and the third, from the Deloitte Digital blog is entitled Scrumban: a different way to be Agile.

Scrum for Trello, Burndown for Trello and Boards for Trello are add-ons for Trello I plan to put through their paces this year.

Additional Reading:

These articles will help to give a quick comparison of the approaches.

A Howto on the Scrumban methodology from LeanSoftwareEngineering.com
A Quick Comparison of Scrumban, Kanban and Scrum
Scrum, Kanban and Scrumban - A Fast Overview
Why Stretched Teams do Scrumban

Parting Thoughts

I think this approach should be applicable to non-software and non-technical teams as well, but I haven't done much reading in that direction.

Chandler and Trac - Getting them talking

Okay... I've been bitten by the GTD way. So I've been trying to adopt tools that help me to get things done. The key philosophy I've taken from GTD is having all my todos in a single trusted location. Trust is important, if your brain is still trying to remember things you're wasting energy.

My key tools (trusted locations) are Trac Tickets (I use other features of Trac also, but less so) and Chandler. My problem? I have two "trusted" locations and, unfortunately, the two don't "speak" to each other yet...... I currently have a preference for Chandler because I can enter my todo information much faster than in Trac. As a result, I've been using Trac less and less (I'm yet to decide if this is bad or good).

My plan? I want to see how I can get them to communicate. The ideal scenario would be for me to experience everything inside of Chandler. The minimal functionality I'll need is the ability to view my Trac tickets in Chandler, I could use the RSS feed from Trac Tickets except Chandler doesn't seem to "like" the HTTPS based address or the need for a username and password.