Are Scrum and Kanban two sides of the same coin?

Scrum and Kanban are two terms that are often used interchangeably or thought as two sides of the same coin.

Theoretically, both Scrum and Kanban encourage work to be broken down into smaller chunks. In both frameworks, product managers end up usually creating a lot of dashboards to help visualize workflow. While a scrum board would usually consist of a limited amount of work to be delivered in a predetermined time frame, Kanban boards are designed for efficiency and limit the amount of work to a single condition.

However, the assumption can be falsely misleading since the two frameworks differ significantly in the way they define requirements and deliver software.

Team Roles:

There are three categories of roles in a scrum team. The product owner is responsible for acting as the customer’s voice and prioritizing the work. The scum master managed the project by making sure everyone understands and adheres to the practices, rules and values of scrum. The development team builds and delivers agreed upon work in increments.

The whole team owns the Kanban board. Unlike scrum, there is no single “Kanban master” who is responsible for making sure that the team runs smoothly. It’s the collective responsibility of the entire team to collaborate on and deliver the tasks on the board.

Release methodology:

Scrum teams usually commit to merge new solutions every sprint. Sprints are usually 2 weeks long, although, nowadays it is normal to have ad-hoc release in scrum.

In Kanban, the changes are release as soon as they are ready, with no pre define scheduled. If the task gets completed earlier (or later), it can be released as needed without having to wait for a release milestone like sprint review.

Change Management

Scrum teams commit of a particular solution within a sprint. There are no changes made to sprint scope after the commitment. Usually there is a ceremonious demo at the end of the sprint to showcase the new working prototype.

The determined work in a Kanban workflow can change at any time. New priorities can come up and existing priorities can be redefined. Kanban also allows the teams to recalibrate the WIP depending on changes in capacity.

Key Metrics

Velocity is the number of story points completed in a sprint, and is used as one of the key metric used to track the performance of scrum teams.

Lead and cycle time are important metrics that measure the amount of time a request sits on a team dashboard vs the amount of the team spent working on the issue.