Kanban is the new Scrum

 

It seems lately that I'm finding quite a few articles on the web where people are moving away from Scrum to Kanban.  As this post from the blog "Journey of Continuous Improvement" indicates:

Some people will argue that we weren’t doing Scrum right so no wonder we had problems. But this is the crux of my problem with it – so much effort goes to doing scrum instead of channelling that focus to building better software, faster.  For my team, using Kanban to liberate us from a prescribed process and visualising the way we worked allowed us to have this focus.  I think there is a misconception that Kanban is a process and directly comparable to scrum. I don’t see it like that. I see Kanban as a set of practices which helps teams define their own way to work with absolute freedom. It wraps around your way of working and helps you refine it.

The section about liberating from a "prescribed process" was interesting to me as many think Scrum is about being flexible, but in reality if you're doing it "right" you have to come up with good story point estimates and plan your Sprints to ensure you deliver working software at the end of a Sprint.  Estimating is notoriously hard and even more so if you're doing cutting edge software.

In this post from "Blue Sky on Mars", it outlines a similar sentiment:

With Scrum, this sort of planning is built-in to the process. You estimate all of the stories in question, add them up and divide by the velocity to find out how many sprints it’ll take. Or, compute how many sprints you have and then you can choose which stories fit best into the time you have.