Scrumban
Hybrid combining Scrum's structure with Kanban's flow.
Scrumban is a hybrid agile framework that combines elements of Scrum (roles, ceremonies, structured cadence) with elements of Kanban (continuous flow, work-in-progress limits, pull-based work intake), articulated by Corey Ladas in his 2008-2009 series of essays and his 2009 book Scrumban: Essays on Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development. Scrumban typically retains Scrum's roles and time-boxed events but replaces fixed Sprint backlogs with a continuous flow of work pulled from the backlog as capacity opens, often using Kanban WIP limits per workflow stage rather than per Sprint. The hybrid is particularly useful for teams transitioning from Scrum to Kanban (or vice versa), for maintenance and operations work where Sprint cadence fits poorly, and for teams whose work has variable urgency that Sprint planning cannot accommodate well. Scrumban has substantially less commercial certification ecosystem than Scrum and is more practitioner-defined than formally specified, with implementations varying significantly across teams.
Core components
- Hybrid of Scrum and Kanban elements
- Often retains Scrum roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Developers)
- Continuous flow work intake (Kanban-style)
- Work-in-progress (WIP) limits per workflow stage
- Sometimes time-boxed events (Sprint Planning, Retrospective)
- Pull-based work selection
- Particularly suited to maintenance, operations, and mixed-urgency contexts
- Less formal specification than pure Scrum or Kanban
Primary use case
Teams transitioning between Scrum and Kanban; maintenance, support, and operations work where Sprint cadence is awkward; teams with variable work urgency; gradual evolution paths from Scrum to Kanban or vice versa; mixed development-and-operations teams; alternative for teams finding pure Scrum too rigid or pure Kanban too unstructured.
Common criticisms
- Less formally specified than Scrum or Kanban, leading to substantial implementation variability — 'Scrumban' can mean very different things across teams
- can become a label for not-quite-Scrum and not-quite-Kanban without genuine integration discipline
- risks losing the benefits of either parent framework while keeping the costs of both
- commercial certification ecosystem is small relative to Scrum, limiting standardization
- some implementations are essentially Kanban with Scrum vocabulary, others are Scrum with Kanban vocabulary, neither leveraging the genuine hybrid potential.
Lineage
- Child of
- Scrum
- Siblings
- Scrum, Kanban
- Derived from
- Scrum