On the project I am currently working on we recently decided to adapt the SCRUM process to include some LEAN flavoured sauce.
Specifically we found the way we were running sprints was not working for us. We are in a period in the UK where lots of people take their annual holidays, as a consequence of this we have project members dropping in and out of the project. Planning sprints using previous velocity had become a bit more complex than it should be; so we decided to not decide up front what our sprint would deliver.
We wanted to start each sprint with just one story per developer, so they had initial work to do, and no more. As each developer finished a story they could pull a new one into the sprint. We recognised that we would need to impose Work In Progress (WIP) limits to eliminate waste. If a developer found they had finished a story but the WIP limit had been hit, they would have to change hats and pull a story from the Developer done queue and into the Test queue AND test it.
We decided that a Kanban board would be the best way for us to visualize how the sprint was progressing. Here is our Kanban board.
The Backlog column represents all stories that could be worked on, these all having been ranked on priority by our customer.
The Selected column represents those stories which should next be pulled into the sprint.
The Developer column has been subdivided into ongoing and done, the jury is still out on these names effectively done here means in the test queue.
The Test column has also been subdivided into ongoing and done; done being a state the story is still in until it meets our Done, Done criteria.