Do i pick Kanban or Scrum?

Software development methodologies have been around since the 1960’s when the first commercial large-scale business systems that performed heavy number crunching routines were developed for business conglomerates. But the pace has drastically increased in the last two decades as technology has reached more consumers and become increasingly prevalent. While it still feels like a bit of a stretch to say that every tech company out there is using agile methodology, it might be safer to claim that most successful companies have found a way to incorporate at least a version of agile in their development processes.

Scrum and Kanban are two of the hottest frameworks in agile methodologies today, and the ones that I have had the most amount of experience with. Here, I plan to discuss the key questions that would be need to answered to identify if Scrum or Kanban is the right development methodology for your product.

How often do you change priorities?

In most companies, a sprint is normally two weeks long. However, if you have trouble locking the scope for two weeks at least, perhaps scrum would not be the ideal framework for your software. Anything about 25% of scope churn during a two-week period can act detrimental towards delivering within a strict deadline. Kanban allows teams to drop the fixed window, and can help your engineers adapt more easily to changing priorities.

Do your teams struggle to break features into incremental pieces of value to be delivered in less than a week? In theory, both frameworks work best when you break your work down into smaller incremental pieces. However, sometimes if your resources are new, the team can have trouble breaking user stories in two weeks. Sometimes, these sprints can also help identify the team’s actual capacity. Scrum sprint time box can help teams new to the practice recognize their deficiency (work not completed at the end of the sprint) and adapt (retrospective).

Are your teams highly disciplined with technical practices such as continuous integration, delivery etc?

Again, both frameworks excel in an environment of strong technical practices. However, the lightweight framework of Kanban pairs well with a strong technical and automated process to build, merge and deploy code to production servers. Kanban team may be able to reach a higher optimization level by having a constant flow of work.

What is the top priority of the software?

Kanban has a strong focus on cycle time, where Scrum has a stronger focus on velocity. Both can be tuned to provide very similar output, but Kanban has the flexibility to lower batch size to reduce cycle time at the potential cost of productivity. However, larger platforms using a variety of micro services might need to choose stability over frequent releases tilting it more towards a scrum based methodology, which can help provide more guidance and checks for release planning and progress tracking.

What is the organizational culture?

If your organization culture has a higher level of ceremony, the Scrum framework might be a better fit due to the inherent nature of framework in comparison to methodologies such as RUP, PMBOK, and PRINCE2. It can also integrate well into a culture that requires more documentation and artifacts. While this might look as wastage from a Lean Development perspective, sometime the reality of working in bigger organization mean that we have to fit within a certain culture and incrementally work ourselves out of it.