Agility, Scrum and Kanban

Why agility

Imagine a bakery website redesign run “in one block”: three months of requirements, three months of building, then a final delivery. When it goes live, you discover that online cake ordering, judged essential at the start, barely interests customers, while everyone is asking for the holiday opening hours. Six months of work, and customer feedback that arrives too late.

An agile approach reverses the logic: you deliver a first useful version early, you observe how it is used, and you adjust what comes next. The Agile Manifesto (2001) sums up this mindset: individuals and interactions, working product, customer collaboration and responding to change are valued over processes, comprehensive documentation, contract negotiation and following a fixed plan. The latter still have value, but less than the former.

Scrum

Scrum is the most widespread agile framework. It divides time into fixed-length sprints of one month at most (often two weeks). Each sprint produces a usable increment.

Three accountabilities:

• the Product Owner maximizes the value of the product: they maintain and order the Product Backlog and settle priorities;
• the Developers (everyone who does the work: development, design, writing, testing) build the increment and organize themselves;
• the Scrum Master helps the team and the organization apply Scrum and removes obstacles. This is not a project manager who hands out tasks.

Five events:

1. the Sprint itself, which contains all the others;
2. Sprint Planning: why this sprint (the goal), what, and how;
3. the Daily Scrum, 15 minutes for the Developers;
4. the Sprint Review: you show the increment to stakeholders and adapt the backlog;
5. the Sprint Retrospective: the team improves the way it works.

Three artifacts: the Product Backlog (an ordered list of everything that could improve the product, with the product goal), the Sprint Backlog (the sprint goal, the selected items and the plan to deliver them) and the Increment, which must meet the Definition of Done.

Kanban

Kanban starts from the work as it is done today and improves it gradually. Its practices:

• visualize the flow on a board: one card per item, one column per stage (To do, In progress, In review, Done);
• limit work in progress (WIP): for example, at most three cards in “In progress”. When the column is full, you finish something before starting something new;
• manage the flow: you measure the cycle time (from the start to the end of a card) and the throughput (cards completed per week);
• make the rules explicit (what does “In review” mean?) and improve continuously.

Kanban imposes neither sprints nor roles: cards enter the flow as soon as there is room.

Which one to choose?

Situation	Better fit
Building a new product or a redesign, step by step	Scrum
Continuous flow of unpredictable requests (support, maintenance, small changes)	Kanban
Beginner team that needs a framework and a rhythm	Scrum
Team that first wants to make its current work visible and smoother	Kanban

Many teams combine them: Scrum sprints with a board that limits work in progress. What matters is to deliver often, make work visible and keep improving.