An Empirical Study of Scrumban Formation based on the Selection of Scrum and Kanban Practices

Scrumban is a combination of practices from Kanban and Scrum practices to manage the development of software based on different project situations. Scrumban practices formation can differ based on different projects and team members. However, since each method has its own pros and cons, inappropriate formation of Scrumban practices may lead to increased waste and time of development, and decreased quality, which in turn, affect the Agile organizations and cause inefficient and ineffective development. Practitioners of Kanban and Scrum are convinced that a combination of both methods is better than the use of one and thus, practitioners should be guided in their decision making. This study aims to show how Scrumban method is formed based on a combination of Kanban and Scrum methods. Scrumban formation and the identification of the factors, which assist in the combination of Kanban and Scrum were conducted through a review of the previous work and semi-structured interviews with 7 Agile experts, after which, content analysis was conducted to analyse the gathered data. Different factors - the method prescription, roles and responsibilities, adoption time, team size, batch size, requirements prioritization, feature size, lead time, technical practices, cost and quality, assist Agile team members in the formation of Scrumban by combining appropriate Kanban and Scrum practices. In addition, Scrumban were found to be more appropriate than Scrum or Kanban in saving time, improving quality and minimizing waste

Incorporating Prioritized User Preferences in Search System

Web services are increasing daily and users are looking to find relevant services in a quick manner. Browsing irrelevant pages presented in a retrieval hitlist would consume time and effort. Hence, there is a need to reduce the search space which will then present users with a higher retrieval precision. The idea carried out by a priority based retrieval system is that, when one attributes links to another, it is basically indicating the importance of the other attribute. The higher the value, the more important the attribute is. In this work, the search requirements defined by users are accompanied by priority values. Relevant documents identified from various resources are sorted based on the priority values. Results obtained indicate that by using priority values, users of a retrieval system are better satisfied. The undertaken precision analysis shows that relevancy of the retrieved results is improved