Re:Ask HN: Why Not Kanban?
by rhaway84773 on Thursday August 31, 2023 @08:53AM
(#37336393)
Doesn’t Kanban split development into chunks of work as well?
The only difference between Kanban and scrum that I can see is that Kanban doesn’t insist on a 2 week sprint, although there’s no reason why you can’t adopt a Kanban system with a 2 week checkpoint and prediction window as well.
Kanban shows you where you are (how you use this info is up to you).
Scrum shows you where you are and tries to predict where you'll be in 2 weeks.
Where Scrum goes horribly wrong is when management tries to treat the 2 week prediction as a guarantee rather than a guess ... and to compound the problem imposes tougher predictions/deadlines to squeeze out more work.
Whatever the stated intentions, in practice Scrum almost always goes bad in this way.
The benefit of "scrum" is that it splits the development into chunks of work that can be used when planning, which is why it is well suited when the majority of work consists of development and delivery of new features.
On the other hand, "kanban" works much better when the majority of work is maintenance, bug fixes, paying off of technical debt and only a limited amount of new development.