What is Kanban
Kanban is Japanese for “visual sign” or
“card.” It is a visual framework used to implement Agile that shows what to
produce, when to produce it, and how much to produce. It encourages small,
incremental changes to your current system and does not require a certain set
up or procedure. Kanban is called the “pull system.” When looking at Kanban vs
Agile, it’s important to remember that Kanban is one flavor of Agile. It’s one
of many frameworks used to implement agile software development.
In the context, Kanban board is easy to learn
and understand, it improves flow of work, and minimizes cycle time. The
benefits of Kanban include:
- Increases flexibility: Kanban is an evolving, fluid model. There are no set phase durations and priorities are reevaluated as new information comes in.
- Reduces waste: Kanban revolves around reducing waste, ensuring that teams don’t spend time doing work that isn’t needed or doing the wrong kind of work.
- Easy to understand: The visual nature of Kanban helps to make it incredibly intuitive and easy to learn. The team doesn’t need to learn a completely new methodology, and Kanban can be easily implemented on top of other systems in place.
- Improves delivery flow: Kanban teams optimize the flow of work out to customers. Like continuous delivery (CD), Kanban focuses on the just-in-time delivery of value and delivering work to customers on a regular cadence.
- · Minimizes cycle time: Cycle time is the amount of time it takes for work to move through the team’s workflow. In Kanban projects, the entire team helps to ensure the work is moving quickly and successfully through the process.
What is Scrum
Scrum is a subset of Agile. It is a lightweight
process framework for agile development, and the most widely-used one. A
“process framework” is a particular set of practices that must be followed in
order for a process to be consistent with the framework.
In the context, Scrum is a highly prescriptive
framework with specific roles and ceremonies. While it can be a lot to learn,
these rules have a lot of advantages. The benefits of Scrum include:
- More transparency and project visibility: With daily stand-up meetings, the whole team knows who is doing what, eliminating many misunderstandings and confusion. Issues are identified in advance, allowing the team to resolve them before they get out of hand.
- Increased team accountability: There is no project manager telling the Scrum Team what to do and when. Instead, the team collectively decides what work they can complete in each sprint. They all work together and help each other, improving collaboration and empowering each team member to be independent.
- Easy to accommodate changes: With short sprints and constant feedback, it’s easier to cope with and accommodate changes. For example, if the team discovers a new user story during one sprint, they can easily add that feature to the next sprint during the backlog refinement meeting.
- Increased cost savings: Constant communication ensures the team is aware of all issues and changes as soon as they arise, helping to lower expenses and increase quality. By coding and testing features in smaller chunks, there is continuous feedback
Scrum vs Kanban:
Scrum
and Kanban are both flavors of Agile, but they have some distinct differences.
- Scrum requires specific roles whereas Kanban has no required roles.
- A Scrum board is reset after each sprint. A Kanban board is continuously used.
- Scrum is based on time boxed iterations, combining planning, process improvement, and release. In Kanban, you can choose to do these activities on a regular cadence or whenever you need.
- Scrum limits work in progress (WIP) in each iteration, whereas Kanban limits WIP in each workflow.
- Scrum resists change, whereas Kanban easily accommodates and embraces change. In Scrum, once the team has committed stories to a sprint, you can’t add additional stories later on. In Kanban, you can add or change stories as you please, assuming that it’s within WIP limits.
- A Scrum team is cross-functional and one team owns the Scrum board. In Kanban, teams don’t need to be cross-functional and anyone can own the Kanban board.
- Estimation forms the basis for Sprint Planning in Scrum whereas Kanban is a continuous model of delivery, so estimation doesn't hold significance.
And Scrum and Kanban also have some
similarities:
- They are empirical. You have to experiment with the process to see what works for you.
- They are Lean and Agile.
- Both allow team members to work on multiple products at once.
- They both limit WIP (although the way they each limit WIP is different)
- They use pull scheduling
- They focus on delivering software early and often
- Both use transparency to improve process
Scrumban:
Scrumban combines the principles of Scrum and
Kanban into a pull-based system. The team plans out the work that was
established during initiation and continually grooms the backlog. The same
Scrum meetings should take place, but the frequency can change depending on
context and need. The most important part of Scrumban is making sure that work
in progress limits (WIP limits) are followed.
Scrumban takes bits and pieces from both
Scrum and Kanban. For example, it includes the defined roles, daily Scrum, and
other meetings from Scrum. And from Kanban, it takes the Kanban board,
continuous flow, and ability to add changes as needed to the board.
Scrumban can look more like Scrum on the
technical level, but at the cultural level, it will more closely resemble
Kanban. Instead of big changes all at once, Scrumban encourages incremental
changes. If your team is looking to migrate from Scrum to Kanban, Scrumban can
provide a gentle transition.
Which One Is Best?
When comparing Kanban versus Scrum,
there is no definitive winner. The best framework depends on your project,
team, and your goals. Because both Kanban and Scrum are flexible agile
methodologies, you could easily take principles from each and apply them as you
see necessary.
It’s important to remember that true Scrum is a much bigger shift than Kanban. The team will have to learn about the ceremonies, the specific roles, and iterations. On the other hand, Kanban encourages incremental improvements. You can apply Kanban principles to any process you already have in place, even Scrum. Nothing needs to change significantly to get started with Kanban…
Courtesy: Several online blogs, Books & other resources,
