7.3 Kanban, XP, and SAFe

Kanban

Kanban (Japanese for "signboard") is a lean, flow-based method for managing knowledge work. Unlike Scrum, it prescribes no roles, no fixed iterations, and no ceremonies — you overlay it on your existing process and improve evolutionarily.

The core practices

WIP limits — the defining feature

A column with a WIP limit of 3 accepts no new item until one moves forward. This is a pull system: capacity, not a manager, decides when work starts. WIP limits expose bottlenecks (work piles up before the constrained stage) and shorten cycle time.

Flow metrics and Little's Law

Little's Law ties them together: average Cycle Time = average WIP / average Throughput. Cutting WIP (with everything else equal) reduces cycle time — a common CAPM/PMI-ACP fact. Kanban is the natural choice for support, maintenance, and operations work with a continuous, unpredictable intake.

Extreme Programming (XP)

Extreme Programming (XP), created by Kent Beck, pushes technical excellence to the extreme for software teams. Its five values are Communication, Simplicity, Feedback, Courage, and Respect.

CAPM links XP to engineering quality: if a question describes failing builds, defect-prone code, or no automated tests, the XP practices (CI, TDD, pairing, refactoring) are the answer — not a new Scrum role.

SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework)

SAFe scales agile to dozens or hundreds of people across many teams building one large solution.

Key SAFe terms

Use SAFe when many teams must coordinate; it is overkill for a single small team (a frequent distractor).

Lean Principles

Lean thinking (Mary and Tom Poppendieck, Lean Software Development) underpins agile with seven principles:

1. Eliminate waste — remove anything not adding value.
2. Amplify learning — short feedback loops.
3. Decide as late as possible — keep options open to the last responsible moment.
4. Deliver as fast as possible — short cycle times.
5. Empower the team — give autonomy.
6. Build integrity in — quality is everyone's job.
7. Optimize the whole — improve the full value stream, not silos.

Choosing a Framework

Scrumban and Combining Frameworks

Real teams often blend frameworks, and the exam expects you to recognize the hybrids. Scrumban keeps Scrum's roles and cadence but adds Kanban's WIP limits and pull-based flow — popular for maintenance teams transitioning off Scrum or Scrum teams drowning in unplanned work. Many teams also run Scrum with XP engineering practices: Scrum supplies the management wrapper (roles, events, backlog) while XP supplies the technical discipline (TDD, continuous integration, pairing). These are not contradictions; Scrum is intentionally silent on engineering technique, so layering XP fills the gap.

When a question pairs a delivery cadence with a technical-quality problem, the strongest answer often combines the two rather than choosing only one.

Choosing Among the Frameworks — Worked Scenarios

Consider three quick scenarios. A help-desk team handles a steady stream of unpredictable tickets and wants to cap simultaneous work and surface bottlenecks. The pull system, WIP limits, and lack of fixed iterations make Kanban the fit. A 90-person product organization with eight teams must release one coordinated solution every quarter. The need to align many teams on a cadenced planning interval points to SAFe, with its Agile Release Train and Program Increment. A single eight-person team building a new product with evolving requirements wants regular feedback and a simple, well-known structure. That is textbook Scrum.

Matching the scale and the dominant problem — flow, scaling, technical quality, or iterative delivery — to the framework's defining feature is exactly how CAPM frames these items, so anchor your choice to that defining feature rather than to surface keywords.