SCRUM | KANBAN | SCRUM Vs KANBAN – DIFFERENCES | SCRUM & KANBAN – SIMILARITIES |
Scrum and Kanban are the most used forms of Agile.
- Scrum is founded in empirical process control theory which distinguishes it from other agile frameworks. It asserts that knowledge comes from experience, and promotes making decisions based on what is known.
- KANBAN is Just in Time (JIT) production method, which aims to produce the amount of a product demanded by the customer when it’s needed and in the required quantity. Scrum is little prescriptive where as Kanban is more of adaptive.
SCRUM
Scrum employs an iterative, incremental approach to optimize predictability and control risk.
It is a framework through which complex adaptive problems can be addressed while creatively and productively delivering products/solutions/services of the highest possible value. It does this by upholding these three pillars: transparency, inspection, and adaptation.
Scrum is used to manage complex product development and has been in use since 1990s. It is not a technique or process for building products; rather, it is a framework within which you can employ various techniques and processes. Scrum makes clear the relative efficacy of your product development and product management practices so that you can improve. Scrum is simple to understand, is lightweight but difficult to master.
Scrum Guide for reference can be found here
KANBAN
Kanban is a method for delivering workable solutions/products with an emphasis on continual delivery while not overburdening the development team. Like Scrum, Kanban is a process designed to help teams work collaboratively, efficiently and effectively.
Kanban is often called “demand scheduling” or a “pull system”. Uses visual cues to move and produce materials so that inventory of work is maintained at optimal levels.
Basics principles of Kanban are:
- • Identify the Work flow and Workflow states (Columns on Kanban board representing workflow states);
- • Identify the “Work-in-Progress” limits for the work flow states (maximum number of work items that can be worked upon in the respective workflow states;
- • Manage the flow through workflow states (movement of work items, bottlenecks, etc.).
SCRUM Vs KANBAN – THE DIFFERENCES
There are many differences between the approaches though both Scrum and Kanban focus on releasing workable solution/product or service early and often. Both require self-managed and highly-collaborative teams.
Scrum is closed while Kanban stays open to change: – The main difference is the Scrum’s resistance to change during a sprint and Kanban’s openness to alteration any time. Another distinct difference is the fact that a Scrum board gets reset after each iteration and Kanban can go on, since the backlog is constantly refilled. Also, Scrum asks for team to split into multi-functional smaller groups and demands project completion estimates – none of which are necessary in Kanban. Again, there is no harm in doing high level estimations in Kanban during early stages, breaking work items into same size smaller items help avoid the need of estimation. This improves the predictability by measuring Lead time and cycle time. Let us look at some more differences between Scrum and Kanban
With regards to these methods in relation to each other, cannot necessarily be compared to each other, as they often serve different kinds of work. But in general, it’s known, that Scrum puts a lot more restrictions on the workflow, whereas Kanban allows flexibility and focuses on making improvements possible. Scrum assigns roles, demands time-boxed iterations, Kanban supports an ongoing flow of tasks. Both the methodologies base future improvements on analysis of the experience.
THE GENERAL SIMILARITIES
Scrum and Kanban, they both are Lean and Agile. One should not limit themselves to just one methodology, customize, evolve as necessary to make best use of the best practices offered by Scrum and Kanban sometimes known as Scrumban.
The take-away points are to make use of agile roles, ceremonies such as stand-ups can still add value, carry out retrospections to learn from your experiences and to keep experimenting, as you never know what possible solution may turn out to be the best for you. Organization, culture and team dynamics plays an important role in determining which method is the best fit.
Right reasons for doing Kanban are following:
- Having the option to change priorities when necessary*
- Being able to release items at any time – where time-to-market is critical to reap benefit of the product feature.
- Redundancy of Sprints – work that cannot be bound by time boxing
- Lack of need to make estimations, all that the order of work is based on are priorities example Production incidents.
- Ideal and helpful workflow visualization – Where teams face bottleneck but do not have view of it or where there is a need of greater transparency (insight into what stage of the process has the work reached)
* Product backlog items which are in the queue of “next selected” or “to-do” items for development and not for items already in work flow states/columns after above said queue(column) or in development or in progress i.e. not for work items already moved into ‘In Progress’ / Development work flow states.
