Agile is a set of ideals and principles that serve as our pilot. It practices involve discovering requirements and developing solutions through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customer(s)/end user(s). It advocates adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continual improvement, and it encourages flexible responses to change.
Kanban and Scrum are frameworks that help teams adhere to agile principles and get stuff done.
Usually we try to point out the differences between kanban principles and scrum principles, but in fact this is the surface level. While the practices differ, the principles are largely the same. Anyway I will give a definition of each one and the key differences.
Scrum
Scrum is a framework for product development within which people can address complex adaptive problems and finish on time. Scrum consists of User Stories, Tasks, Story Points and Sprints. Tasks and user stories are estimated with story points and based on that estimation are packed in Sprints with a clear deadline and goal. The sprint direction is determined by a Product Owner who is representing the business and a Scrum Master is a facilitator for the work process, the Scrum Team, and all Stakeholder.
How Scrum works?
Scrum framework has 4 major events — Sprint Planning Meeting, Daily Stand-up Meeting, Sprint Review Meeting and Sprint Retrospective Meeting. Sprints are the heartbeat of Scrum, where ideas are turned into value.They are fixed length events of one month or less to create consistency. A new Sprint starts immediately after the conclusion of the previous Sprint. Another important part of scrum is backlog. Which is much like a long to-do list consisting of all tasks, features and user stories required for delivering a product or service.
Backlog Refinement
Backlog Refinement is an ongoing, continuous activity where the Product Owner and the Scrum Team collaborate on the details and the estimates of the items in the product backlog. It can happen whenever it is needed. The goal of refinement is to make sure the team is reasonably confident it fits in a Sprint.
Sprint Planning Meeting
The goal of the Sprint Planning meeting is to prioritise which tasks from the backlog will be added in the Sprint Backlog, how would they be executed and get a shared commitment for this goal. The Sprints are typically 2 weeks long but the duration can be adjusted to fit the best the specifics of the business, but no more than one month.
Daily Scrum
As the name suggests the Daily Scrum is a daily recurring meeting, no longer than 15 minutes. The goal of it is to synchronise the Scrum Team, the Scrum Master, and the Product Owner while unblocking ongoing tasks by every team member.
Sprint Review
The purpose of the Sprint Review is to inspect the outcome of the Sprint and determine future adaptations. The Scrum Team presents the results of their work to key stakeholders and progress toward the Product Goal is discussed.
During the event, the Scrum Team and stakeholders review what was accomplished in the Sprint and what has changed in their environment. Based on this information, attendees collaborate on what to do next. The Product Backlog may also be adjusted to meet new opportunities. The Sprint Review is a working session and the Scrum Team should avoid limiting it to a presentation.
The Sprint Review is the second to last event of the Sprint and is timeboxed to a maximum of four hours for a one-month Sprint. For shorter Sprints, the event is usually shorter.
Sprint Retrospective Meeting
Retrospectives is a meeting where the Scrum Team meets to reflect on their previous Sprint and to figure out how to improve by asking — what went well, what did not and what can be improved. It allows the team to focus on its overall performance and identify ways for continuous improvement
Kanban
Kanban is all about visualizing your work, limiting work in progress, and maximizing efficiency. Kanban teams focus on reducing the time it takes to take a project(or user story) from start to finish. They do this by using a kanban board and continuously improving their flow of work.
How Kanban works?
1. Visualize the Workflow
To visualize your process with a Kanban system, you will need a board with cards and columns. Each column on the board represents a step in your workflow and each Kanban card represents a task or work item.
2. Limit Work in Progress (WIP)
Set maximum items per stage (column) to ensure multi-tasking is not killing the productivity of your team. Limiting WIP will quickly illuminate problem areas in your flow so you can identify and resolve them.
3. Manage Flow
By flow, we mean the movement of work items through the production process. Managing the flow is about managing the work but not the people.
So instead of micro-managing people and trying to keep them busy all the time, we focus on managing and understanding the work processes. Our goal is to get that work through the system as fast as possible by adjusting the workflow.
4. Make Process Policies Explicit
Write down the rules for moving cards from one column to another hence tasks from one stage to another. Make sure everyone in the team is on the same page and understands the rules.
5. Implement Feedback Loops
In order to improve performance, regular events for knowledge exchange and feedback need to be done. A good starting is doing daily stand-up event for team synchronization.
6. Improve Collaboratively, Experiment and Adapt
The Kanban Method is an evolutionary improvement process. It helps you adopt small changes and improve gradually at a pace and size that your team can handle. See what works for you and what not to achieve maximum productivity.
Kanban vs Scrum: What if you can not choose?
Scrum and kanban are “formal agile frameworks.” They work in a tried and true fashion that is quite frankly hard to argue against. But your decision doesn’t need to be so black and white. Hundreds of teams are using hybrid models influenced by both scrum and kanban.
Scrumban was developed to make it easier for existing Scrum teams to incorporate aspects of Kanban into Scrum and explore lean methodologies. Scrumban combines the structure of Scrum with the flow-based methods and visualization of Kanban. It allows teams to have the agility of Scrum and the simplicity of Kanban while requiring no roles updates and being easy to adopt.
Regardless of what you choose, stick with it for a little while. Take some work from the backlog all the way to done and then ask your team what went well and what went poorly. By trying scrum and kanban and asking these questions, you’re well on your way to agile bliss.
