Kanban or scrum: which agile are you?

Don't ask, "kanban vs scrum." Instead, ask "kanban or scrum" or even "kanban and scrum." Make it more about the principles than the practices.

Agile is a structured and iterative approach to project management and product development. It recognizes the volatility of product development, and provides a methodology for self-organizing teams to respond to change without going off the rails. Today, agile is hardly a competitive advantage. No one has the luxury to develop a product for years or even months in a black box. This means it’s more important than ever to get it right.

Kanban is all about visualizing your work, limiting work in progress, and maximizing efficiency(or flow). Kanban teams focus on reducing the time it takes to take a project(or user story) from start to finish. They do this by using a kanban board and continuously improving their flow of work. 

Scrum teams commit to ship working software through set intervals called sprints. Their goal is to create learning loops to quickly gather and integrate customer feedback. Scrum teams adopt specific roles, create special artifacts, and hold regular ceremonies to keep things moving forward. Scrum is best defined in The Scrum Guide.

	Scrum	Kanban
Cadence	Regular fixed length sprints (ie, 2 weeks)	Continuous flow
Release methodology	At the end of each sprint	Continuous delivery
Roles	Product owner, scrum master, development team	No required roles
Key metrics	Velocity	Lead time, cycle time, WIP
Change philosophy	Teams should not make changes during the sprint.	Change can happen at any time