Kanban vs Scrum
By: Sofia Elizabeth Montenegro
Tags: Scrum, Kanban

More and more companies are using agile methodologies, according to the EducacionIt Adoption Report, 41% of companies are maturing in practice, 19% are experimenting with agile practices and 18% are considering an agile practice .

On the other hand CertiProf (leading institute in professional training), has conducted a survey on December 2019 and February 2020, in order to know the current state of the labor market-agility relationship, the most outstanding practices and the most used frameworks.

One of the most outstanding points of the report is the sustained growth in the use of agile methodologies, not only in the IT industry, which corresponds to 72%, but also within the responses there are also engineering areas, human capital, business / finance, marketing, sales and operations.

Globant, for some time has become an ambassador of Agile methodologies, not only with its practices, events, but also by aligning the stakeholders with its digital transformation programs.

For all the aforementioned, I consider it is important to highlight:

Is impossible to compare Kanban with Scrum, because Kanban is a Method and Scrum is a Framework.

Some strengths of the most two used methodologies within the Agile world, their similarities and characteristics:

Scrum is the most chosen by teams especially in our industry and is recognized as a synonym for Agile, while Kanban is known more as a board, the truth is that both are perfectly compatible and both are combined to achieve the same objective.

Kanban is based on:

-Continuous development and delivery, made up of simultaneous tasks. -Kanban teams use visual planning tools, which make up a board, where you can see the User Stories and how they move in their different states, each represented in a column until completion.

When to use kanban?

-When the work flow is continuous, For example, in support and maintenance teams. -In teams with many incoming requests with different priorities.

The important thing:

- WIP limit, is to limit the tasks that can be per column and per person. - The key is to visualize the flow at glance and quickly detect queues or bottlenecks.

Scrum: like Kanban it is also divided into user stories and displayed in a workflow.

Scrum teams commit to deliver value every certain time interval, which is clearly established and can vary from 1 to 4 weeks, these iterations are called Sprints.

Scrum puts emphasis on its pillars, constant inspection, adaptation and transparency, as well as making a retrospective and if it is necessary to make any changes to achieve the objective in a transparent way for the team.

When to use Scrum?

-In teams that seek to deliver value continuously and incrementally at the end of each sprint, teams committed to the job. -Scrum is used to solve complex problems (eg, building an innovative product) where continuous inspection and adaptation is required. In addition to having a common Sprint goal on the team

Scrumban: This term arises from the need to unite both methodologies and is used in those teams that are in an intermediate point between Scrum and Kanban, adopting the best of both methodologies for managing teams and achieving objectives.