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by Ben Hughes on 19 December 2014
We were recently asked this question by a participant on the Learning the hard parts of agile software development webinar. There is no right answer to this question as it is dependent on the team dynamic that you have and the projects that you are working on. Kanban and Scrum are actually tackling quite different problems.
Scrum is more around the team creation and how you approach work. Scrum involves chunking work out into sprints between one and four weeks long, working through them iteratively, and getting a shippable product at the end.
Kanban the method relates to the concept of a continuous flow of work to deliver constant value, which contrasts to Scrum which delivers chunks of work in sprints. As such, Kanban is similar to Scrum but with an infinite sprint length. Many people see Kanban as the Kanban board, which is just one part of the method. The board is about putting a visualisation on your current process and using it to check and analyse how your process is going, to identify pain points.
Depending on the project you are working on Kanban or Scrum may be more suitable. If you are working on a project with larger time frames, say six to eight months and you expect it to deliver at that point, then Kanban may be a better choice. If you need to deliver every couple of weeks, then the sprint nature of Scrum may be more suitable.
Scrum is a larger change activity for your team than Kanban and this may also be a consideration when adopting an agile approach. The team will need to become familiar with a completely new approach to working - Scrum, then use it well enough to deliver project results. Kanban, on the other hand, you can use today, with your existing approach with no further change.
Note also that Kanban and Scrum can work in tandem, enhancing the effectiveness of each other and this may be a topic we can explore in a future blog post.
Further ideas on Kanban and Scrum are also explained in our blog post Can you apply Lean software development principles to Scrum?
