Empirical Investigation of Scrumban in Global Software Development.

Scrumban combines two Agile approaches (Scrum and Kanban) to create a management framework for improving software engineering practices. Scrumban is expected to override both Scrum and Kanban, as it inherits the best features of both. However, there is little understanding of the possible impact of Scrumban on software development in prior studies. This study first makes a comparison among Scrum, Kanban, and Scrumban and then investigates the impact of Scrumban on six major challenges of global software development. This study was conducted in a distributed project at two Software Factories in two universities in Finland and Italy. The results show that Scrumban could positively affect issues such as evenness of different sites, communication, and cultural issues as well as leveraging resources among sites. However, there are still few challenges that require alternative methodologies and tools other than Scrumban to be overcome.