Scrum Vs Waterfall Vs Kanban

Scrum vs. Waterfall vs. Kanban is all terms you might have heard of when learning to become a software craftsman. Everyone talks about them, and everyone has an opinion. But what's the difference between these three popular approaches to software development? Is one better than the others? Are there any similarities between them? In this article, we'll try to answer these questions by observing specific aspects of each methodology.

What is Scrum?

Scrum is a framework for managing product development. It is a way to prioritize work, manage the team collaboration, and communicate expectations. Scrum has three main activities essential to all projects:

• Scrum teams typically create a product roadmap consisting of a few significant milestones with a few smaller goals within each milestone.
• Second, Scrum allows teams to easily adjust the product roadmap based on circumstances, such as new data or market research findings.
• Finally, it gives a team a clear understanding of how to create and manage those products over the long run.

When to use Scrum

Scrum helps manage teams with difficult or complex work, including software development. For example, it's common for product development teams to have various stakeholders, including customers and other departments.

Scrum excels at managing these types of projects because it has high visibility and clear expectations around what happens during each phase of the work.

Why Scrum is unique

Scrum has three unique characteristics that set it apart from other project management frameworks:

Self-organization - Scrum does not prescribe a specific team structure or imply that certain departments should work together. Instead, it empowers team members to choose how to organize themselves best.

Planning through transparency - Scrum is a transparent process. All team members, stakeholders, and other stakeholders can see what work is being worked on, how far along it is, and what the team expects to be completed by the next meeting.

Continuous adaptation - Scrum is a way of thinking and working, not a one-and-done process. It empowers teams to make changes along the way by taking advantage of its transparency, self-organization, and backlog of work.

What is Kanban?

Kanban is a process for managing workflow. It is often used as an alternative to Scrum for more straightforward, smaller projects. Kanban can also be used as a supplement to Scrum to help optimize workflow.

Kanban is often visualized as a board with cards representing work items. Work is represented as cards that move across the board as it progresses through stages, such as creativity and development.

When to use Kanban

Kanban is a good choice for managing projects with less pressure to hit specific deadlines. Some examples of Kanban industries include manufacturing, health care, and software development.

Why Kanban is unique

Kanban is different from Scrum in several ways:

• There is less focus on team collaboration - Kanban doesn't prioritize bringing a team together in one room to collaborate daily. Instead, it emphasizes a more decentralized workflow where team members work from home and can still collaborate effectively.
• There is less focus on product management - Kanban is a less rigorous process than Scrum. There is less focus on creating product roadmaps, tracking hours worked, and other details that Scrum teams are hyper-focused on.
• There is less focus on project management - Kanban is an adaptable process that can be applied to various projects and industries. It is not as prescriptive as Scrum, which is meant for managing software development projects.

What is Waterfall?

The waterfall process is a sequential management approach to software development. It is based on the idea that project management and product development should be linear processes where one phase leads directly to the next.

However, waterfall software development has recently been criticized because it is overly strict. It often requires that each phase be completed before the team can move on to the next phase of the project, which can cause projects to be significantly delayed if something goes wrong.

When to use Waterfall

The Waterfall is a good choice for managing projects where you have a clear vision for what you want to create, and a few unknown variables could affect your project.

Waterfall excels when there are no unknowns in the project, such as when you have a product that doesn't have many variables or is based on specific requirements.

Why Waterfall is unique

The Waterfall is unique in how it prioritizes project phases. Unlike Scrum, which prioritizes work items, and Kanban, which prioritizes workflow, Waterfall prioritizes different project stages. This means, for example, that the design phase of a project is more critical than the ideation phase, regardless of the amount of work being done in each step.

Difference between Scrum, Kanban, and Waterfall

Scrum is a product development methodology that emphasizes delivering working software at regular intervals. The name derives from the Scrum Development Process, which describes the roles, responsibilities, and activities involved in completing a project.

Waterfall development is a model for software development that describes a linear process of software development using a sequential, step-by-step approach, with each step having its deliverables. In waterfall methodologies, management decides what features to build and how to implement them; this is known as the "requirements" phase. Then developers create code in a specific order to meet particular requirements, known as the "design" phase. Finally, developers test their work and then deploy it to production if it passes testing.

Kanban is an agile software development method that avoids long meetings by having everyone update their Kanban boards when they have something meaningful to contribute. Each person has their commission, which contains columns for tasks they or need to accomplish during their time at work (e.g., "writing documentation," "creating an application").

Conclusion

Despite their differences, all three project management frameworks have one overarching purpose: to help teams create better products. So no matter which method you choose, keep in mind that each methodology offers the potential for improvement and the opportunity to learn new skills.