Scrum? Kanban? It doesn’t really matter

Over the past 8 years I’ve developed in both Scrum and Kanban.

There were times when I preferred Scrum over Kanban and times when I preferred Kanban over Scrum.

About two years ago, I came to an interesting conclusion — it doesn’t matter what you call it as long as you apply the right principles.

Scrum vs. Kanban

A personal story, I started my career in a Scrum team. It worked brilliantly (I have written many posts about Scrum) until we started working on a new, very important project. The requirements changed all the time during the sprints and the estimations were way off, since we were working on unfamiliar domains.

So we decided to do the only reasonable thing — switch to Kanban (I have also written about Kanban). In Kanban, we didn’t have sprints and we were fine with constantly changing requirements; we were always working on the most important tasks. But there were two problems : We were working only on the most important tasks and we were always working.

Since we always worked on the top priority tasks, we had no opportunity to work on anything but new features. We had no time to work on our tech debts or time to improve our tools and infrastructures.