After over eight years of software product management in different industries (web portals, banking, payment, etc.), I worked with different software development methodologies – from waterfall approaches to agile models such as Scrum or Kanban. In my opinion, every approach has its right to exist and might be the best possible solution in a given situation, depending on the type of project, culture, requirements, degree of maturity of all involved people, etc. I really love working with Scrum or Kanban and recently wanted to come up with a summary of all differences between these two methodologies, since lines seem a bit blurred here in my opinion. Here’s what I come up with:
- Artifacts: Scrum board, backlog, different types of requirement hierarchies (e.g. theme, epic, story, task), burn-down chart, velocity, etc. in Scrum vs. only a board in Kanban.
- Iterations: Yes (sprints) for Scrum vs. no (a continuous flow) for Kanban.
- Estimations: Yes for Scrum vs. no (items of similar sizes) for Kanban.
- Changes: To be defined, groomed and estimated for the next sprint in Scrum vs. added to the board as needed in Kanban.
- Roles: Product Owner, Scrum Master and Team in Scrum vs. Team and other needed roles in Kanban.
- Teams: Cross-functional in Scrum against teams which can be specialized in Kanban.
- Ceremonies: Sprint planning, daily stand-up, sprint review and sprint retrospective in Scrum vs. daily stand-up, regular reviews and retrospectives on set dates and continuous planning in Kanban.