How banning Scrum increased my team’s velocity and happiness

Photo by Jed Villejo on Unsplash

Ok, the title is a little bit click-baity on this blog as it’s actually to do with using scrumban instead of outright banning scrum but the sentiment is something I’m sure most people working on a software delivery team will find alluring.

In my day job I work as a cell lead working on an project that has evolved through multiple stages:

• We started by taking on an existing codebase that had been running in production for 12 years with the view of keeping the live site working while refactoring the system
• Then when the 2020 pandemic hit we found ourselves frantically expanding the client’s offering to additional markets in order to reduce some of the uncertainty that the situation created
• Finally after the pandemic panic, we were asked to continue the delivery of an existing project to deliver a new site on a newer technology stack that was shelved due to the pandemic but that the team hadn’t been part of (and in-fact I found myself leading a new team)

Preparing to scrum

During the time that the project we were picking up was shelved, the architects had been re-evaluating the technologies they wanted to use and moved from a series of REST based microservices to a GraphQL solution that used a GraphQL…