Agile

Scrum vs. Kanban: A Practical Guide for Busy Software Teams

Whether you’re scaling a startup or keeping a mature product humming, most teams reach for either Scrum or Kanban (or a hybrid). Here’s a clear, opinionated walkthrough you can drop straight into your engineering blog.

What is Scrum?

Scrum is a lightweight framework for delivering value in time-boxed iterations called sprints (typically 1–4 weeks). It optimizes for predictable cadence, inspect-and-adapt cycles, and tight feedback loops.

Core Roles (Actors)

Product Owner (PO)
Owns product outcomes. Curates and orders the backlog to ensure we’re building the most valuable things first.
Scrum Master (SM)
Serves the team. Removes impediments, facilitates ceremonies, and helps the team continuously improve.
Developers / Team Members
Build, test, design, document—everything required to turn ideas into a Done increment.

Key Artifacts

Product Backlog
The evolving, ordered list of everything that might improve the product—customer needs, stakeholder requests, technical work, and ideas.
Release (or Product Goal) Backlog
A subset of the product backlog aligned to a near-term goal or release theme.
Sprint Backlog
The set of backlog items selected for the current sprint, plus the plan for delivering them.

Flow of Work (Phases & Events)

Release Planning
PO selects high-value items for an upcoming release, orders them, and—together with the team—estimates them (often in story points).
Backlog Refinement (a.k.a. Grooming)
A regular session to clarify acceptance criteria, split work, re-order priorities, and size items. Keeps upcoming work “ready.”
Sprint Planning
The team (not the PO) decides how much to pull into the sprint based on velocity and capacity.
- Phase 1: Refine requirements – Final clarifications and (re)estimates.
- Phase 2: Task breakdown & hours – Split stories into tasks, estimate in hours, and balance against real capacity (holidays, on-call, etc.). Adjust scope if needed.
Sprint Review (Demo)
Show working software. The PO accepts items that meet the definition of done and acceptance criteria.
Sprint Retrospective
Inspect the process. Choose a small set of improvement actions for the next sprint.

Personal Note
Many sources merge story-point estimation and task-hours into a single meeting. In tools like VersionOne/Jira, keeping story points for forecasting and task hours for daily planning separate has helped my teams refine velocity and improve sprint accuracy—even if it didn’t always move the needle on long-range release accuracy.

What is Kanban?

Kanban emphasizes continuous flow over time boxes. It shines when priorities change frequently or when work arrives unpredictably (e.g., platform, DevOps, support teams).

Core Practices

Visualize the workflow (board columns reflect states such as To Do → In Progress → Review → Done)
Limit Work-In-Progress (WIP) per column to reduce multitasking and context switching
Manage flow (optimize cycle time, spot bottlenecks)
Make policies explicit (entry/exit criteria per column)
Implement feedback loops (standups, replenishment meetings, ops reviews)
Improve collaboratively (data-informed continuous improvement)

There are no fixed roles or sprints by default; teams pull new work whenever capacity becomes available.

Agile Planning (Without the Theater)

Agile planning is about planning continuously, not writing a plan once. Good plans are change-friendly, decision-ready, and just detailed enough to be useful. As Mike Cohn argues, teams fail both by not planning at all and by over-planning. Aim for plans that help you answer: “When might we deliver X?” and “What if priorities change?”—and that are easy to update when they do.

Useful concepts to explore next:

Story points vs. hours (forecasting vs. daily scheduling)
Cone of Uncertainty (earlier estimates are less precise—expect variability)
Capacity-driven planning (account for holidays, on-call, PTO)

Practical Tips You Can Use Tomorrow

Keep backlogs thin and ordered. If everything is priority 1, nothing is.
Refine weekly. Ten minutes of refinement per story now saves hours of churn later.
Separate purpose: points for forecasting, hours for execution.
Make policies explicit. Definition of Ready/Done, entry/exit criteria per column.
Limit WIP. Smaller batch sizes speed up feedback and reduce rework.
Inspect outcomes, not just output. Demo user value; retro process pain honestly.
Use data, not vibes. Track velocity (Scrum) or cycle time/throughput (Kanban) and adjust.

Glossary (Quick Reference)

Story Points: Relative size/complexity used for forecasting.
Velocity: Average points completed per sprint (use rolling averages).
Cycle Time: Time from start to finish for a single item (Kanban staple).
WIP Limit: Max items allowed in a workflow state to improve flow.