Will Kanban replace Scrum?
Choose
- No way, they are opposites
- Kanban is for flow / Scrum batch
- Yes, Scrum is old school big planning steps
- Kanban minimal planning / Scrum is heavy planning
- No, Scrum can reduce to KanBan
As much as we love scrum, even we would have to admit that it’s not perfect. Nothing is. In fact, a large part of our book describes workarounds for various deficiencies that scrum presents to us in certain circumstances.
One of the more commonly noted deficiencies in scrum is that it plans its work a whole Sprint at a time. This “batch” planning process is often not agile enough to cope with the actual rate of change of requirements. In fact, Chapter 4.4 on PlaceHolder Stories, the discussion of the mid-Sprint Re-planning in Chapter 4.8, and the discussion of renegotiating the scope of a Sprint in Chapter 4.3 are all about resolving this deficiency.
There is another agile process, called KanBan, which solves this problem and is becoming popular for software development projects. In our upcoming book we will describe the main strength of KanBan and how to integrate it into scrum.
Brief Description of KanBan
The “KanBan for software” movement is really gaining some traction in the agile community. The main idea of KanBan is very simple and based on the Lean “pull,” “Just in Time” (JIT), and “reduce inventory” principles: eliminate planning inventory by making sure that you don’t commit to doing work until you are actually ready to start the work.

October 28th, 2009 at 2:25 am
Just curious… before you go write a book with editorial on the “main strength of KanBan” will you actually have tried it with a few clients over a few years, and will you engage those active in the Kanban community to get the benefit of their experiences and input and review, or will you repeat the mistakes of some other Agile community folks who’ve chosen to comment on Kanban with no experience and little understanding and ultimately embarrassed themselves?
Will you be coming to the Lean Software & Systems conference in Atlanta in April, or the Kanban track at QCon San Francisco in November or the Lean/Kanban content at Agile Development Practices in Orlando also in November? Hope to see you at some of these events. Please engage with the community on limitedwipsociety.org. We don’t bite and we’d love to help.
David
November 10th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Hi Dave,
Thanks for visiting.
Yes, been there done that.
Yes, we will look at attending the conference in the spring time.
Yes, our broader common agile community is filled with those who claim expertise in one area or another and speak as though they have been doing something for years, when they have not. Knowing when this is the case is hard to distinguish.
Yes, distinguishing between valuable experience, time spent and those who can bring good consulting is even harder.
Engaging with any healthy community should be fun enriching thing, not a biting experience.
- Doug
BTW – Will the conference be filled with talking heads that do not apply but, talk / write prolifically like they do?