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In my experience as a dev... Kanban is a useful tool that helps teams organise work, break it down, be flexible. It helps the whole team to see what needs doing

by nickd2001 2y ago

In my experience as a dev... Kanban is a useful tool that helps teams organise work, break it down, be flexible. It helps the whole team to see what needs doing, identify dependencies and where to help each other out. Scrum OTOH looks similar on the surface, but is a form of micromanagement and becomes a system to be gamed. Project Managers become more concerned with velocity and burndown charts and whether specific stories were done in specific sprints or within the specific story points, than whether actual useful productive work is happening that moves the organisation forward. In the version of Kanban I've been in, you can chuck in the occcasional tech debt story into the so-called "sprint" (basically the 2 weeks between planning meetings) and no-one minds. Thus something that's slowing you down can be fixed. Whereas in Scrum, you'd have to haggle with the project manager to be "allowed" to do something like halve the build time in CI or something.

steve1977 2y ago
I know this will be a very common comment on every topic dealing with Agile methods, but... If you have a project manager in Scrum, you're not doing Scrum. If you have sprints in Kanban, you're not doing Kanban.
- nickd2001 2y ago
  Fair point :) Well actually in my experience they were called a "Delivery Manager" or "Scrum Master" but behaved like a Project Manager, if you see what I mean. And as for Sprints in Kanban, yeah, well Jira kinda works like that and it seems helpful to have some bi-weekly ceremonies and review stuff while only having to do "ideally most of the stories that were asked for" because the ones that were put into sprint are important. In other words, truly Agile (or so it seems to me ;) ) , without being fundamentalist.
  - CRConrad 2y ago
    > And as for Sprints in Kanban, yeah, well Jira kinda works like that I don't think it has to. It can do that, since it's built for both Scrum and Kanban. But you don't have to use the Scrum facilities; if your workplace does, that's because someone there wants it to, and therefore has set up sprints and stuff in Jira.

steve1977 2y ago

I know this will be a very common comment on every topic dealing with Agile methods, but... If you have a project manager in Scrum, you're not doing Scrum. If you have sprints in Kanban, you're not doing Kanban.

nickd2001 2y ago
Fair point :) Well actually in my experience they were called a "Delivery Manager" or "Scrum Master" but behaved like a Project Manager, if you see what I mean. And as for Sprints in Kanban, yeah, well Jira kinda works like that and it seems helpful to have some bi-weekly ceremonies and review stuff while only having to do "ideally most of the stories that were asked for" because the ones that were put into sprint are important. In other words, truly Agile (or so it seems to me ;) ) , without being fundamentalist.
- CRConrad 2y ago
  > And as for Sprints in Kanban, yeah, well Jira kinda works like that I don't think it has to. It can do that, since it's built for both Scrum and Kanban. But you don't have to use the Scrum facilities; if your workplace does, that's because someone there wants it to, and therefore has set up sprints and stuff in Jira.