Scrum vs Lean vs Agile vs Kanban: A Comprehensive Comparison of Project Management Methodologies

With so many project management methodologies to choose from, it can be tricky to select the right approach for your team. In this comprehensive guide, we'll compare the most popular agile frameworks - Scrum, Lean, Kanban, and overall Agile values - so you can determine the best system for your next project.

Why Understanding Project Management Methodologies Matters

Choosing the right project management methodology can have a huge impact on the success of your projects. The methodology influences everything from team dynamics to budgeting, deadlines, and more.

Selecting a system without fully understanding it can lead to frustrated team members, missed deadlines, and projects that fail to meet client needs. That's why it's so important to learn the nuances of approaches like Scrum, Lean, Kanban, and Agile before deciding on implementation.

Scrum Methodology

Scrum is one of the most popular agile project management frameworks. It emphasizes accountability, teamwork, and iterative progress toward a well-defined goal.

Scrum teams use an agile approach to software development by working in short, repeatable cycles called sprints. The typical sprint duration is two weeks to one month.

Each day during the sprint, the scrum team comes together for a brief standup meeting called the daily scrum. Team members take turns answering three questions: What did I accomplish yesterday? What will I work on today? Are there any obstacles in my way?

This scrums methodology keeps work focused on the sprint goal and reinforces accountability within the team. At the end of the sprint, stakeholders review the work and provide feedback that feeds into the next sprint.

Key Elements of Scrum Methodology

There are three key roles that each scrum team is comprised of:

• Product Owner: Responsible for representing stakeholders and defining the product vision and priorities. The product owner maintains the product backlog, which is a ranked list of desired product features and enhancements.

• Scrum Master: Leads the agile process, facilitates scrum meetings, and coaches the team to follow scrum values and processes. The scrum master helps the product owner refine the product backlog and acts as a buffer between the development team and external interference.

• Development Team: A cross-functional group of about 7 people who do the actual work of designing, developing, testing, and delivering increments of potentially shippable product each sprint.

In addition to the core scrum team roles, the scrum framework is comprised of key events, artifacts, and rules that must be followed:

• Sprint Planning Meeting: At the start of each sprint, the team comes together to review priorities in the product backlog and determines which items they can complete during the upcoming sprint.

• Sprint Review Meeting: A review of the work completed during the sprint, where the development team demonstrates finished work to stakeholders for feedback and approval.

• Sprint Retrospective Meeting: A retrospective allows the scrum team to reflect on what went well, areas for improvement, and lessons learned from the sprint. 

• Product Backlog: The product backlog is a prioritized list of desired business and technical capabilities for the product. The product owner continuously grooms the backlog based on feedback and learnings.

• Sprint Backlog: A subset of the product backlog that the development team aims to complete during the upcoming sprint.

• Increment: The potentially shippable product increment produced by the Development Team during each sprint.

• Definition of "Done": Requirements that must be met for work to be considered complete by the Development Team.

By employing this standardized scrum process, teams can work quickly and adapt to changing requirements to deliver high-quality products.

Key Benefits of Scrum

There are several advantages to using the scrum framework:

• Increased transparency - With daily scrum meetings and sprint reviews, scrum enables increased visibility into the progress and health of development efforts.

• Flexibility - Scrum teams can quickly respond to changing priorities and integrate customer feedback using short, iterative sprints rather than long project phases.

• Collaboration - Daily scrums and sprint planning promote better communication and collaboration between team members.

• Efficiency - By working in sprints, teams can detect issues early to reduce waste and focus efforts on the highest valued work.

• Morale and Trust - Scrum encourages teams to learn from mistakes and empowers team members to decide how to accomplish their goals. This builds greater trust and morale.

Scrum vs. Waterfall Development

Scrum is most commonly compared to waterfall development. Waterfall is a linear, sequential approach to software development.

With waterfall, teams move steadily through long, gated phases like requirements, design, implementation, testing, and release. It can take months or years for a waterfall project to reach completion. Backtracking to a previous phase is difficult.

Scrum emphasizes an empirical approach by frequently inspecting real working product and progress to guide the next steps. Releasing in small increments allows for faster feedback and more flexibility.

Waterfall development is most appropriate for projects with well-defined, fixed requirements and low likelihood of change. Scrum is well-suited for complex projects with rapidly evolving requirements.

Scrum Limitations

While scrum offers many benefits, there are some limitations to consider:

• Difficult for dispersed teams - With its emphasis on in-person daily scrums and close collaboration, scrum can be challenging for distributed and remote teams.

• Too rigid for some cultures - Some teams may find the various scrum ceremonies and rigid sprint cycles too restrictive. The prescribed scrum roles may not work for all team dynamics and organizations.

• Challenging for maintenance teams - For teams focused on product maintenance versus active development, the sprint cycles may feel like unnecessary overhead.

• Prioritization conflicts - There can be disagreements between the Development Team's perspective and the Product Owner's priorities. Lack of alignment on priorities undermines progress.

• Unsuitable for large teams - Daily scrums become difficult with more than 10 people. Large projects may be better suited for Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) over standard scrum.

Lean Methodology

Lean software development applies the lean manufacturing principles pioneered by Toyota to the world of software development. The goal of lean is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste.

Some of the key lean principles include:

• Eliminate Waste - Focus on work that adds customer value and remove anything unnecessary.

• Build Quality In - Prevent defects instead of inspecting quality in later.

• Create Knowledge - Empower teams to experiment and gain knowledge iteratively.

• Defer Commitment - Delay decisions until the last responsible moment to avoid rework based on new info.

• Deliver Fast - Employ small batch sizes, iterate quickly, and release often.

• Respect People - Support team autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

• Optimize the Whole - Focus on overall value stream optimization, not localized efficiencies.

Unlike scrum, lean does not define specific roles or ceremonies. It's more of a guiding set of principles and practices meant to eliminate waste and deliver value quickly.

Applying Lean

There are some core practices that embody lean principles:

• Continuous Flow - Work is pulled through development in small batches versus large requirements batches. Features are worked on continuously rather than in long phases.

• Test Driven Development - Engineers write failing tests first, then implement code to pass the tests. This builds quality earlier and enables shorter feedback loops.

• Pair Programming - Developers work in pairs, with one person coding and the other reviewing continually. This spreads knowledge and results in higher code quality.

• Automated Testing - Comprehensive automated test suites are built to enable fast feedback on code changes and quality.

• Continuous Deployment - Lean teams focus on automating build, test, and deployment processes to enable releasing small increments rapidly.

• Minimum Viable Product (MVP) - Lean startups focus on releasing an early MVP quickly to start learning from real customers over building a complex product.

By incorporating these techniques, teams can deliver value quickly while reducing wasted time and effort.

Lean vs. Scrum

Both lean and scrum aim to enable faster value delivery through an iterative approach. But there are some key differences:

• Roles - Scrum prescribes specific team member roles while lean does not.

• Process - Scrum defines a formal process while lean is more flexible and principle-focused.

• Artifacts - Scrum utilizes artifacts like sprint backlogs and burndown charts that lean does not.

• Change philosophy - Lean encourages late decision making while scrum locks down scope for a sprint.

• Quality focus - Lean places greater emphasis on building quality earlier to reduce waste.

In practice, many teams combine aspects of scrum and lean to get the best of both methodologies. Using lean principles while also leveraging helpful scrum ceremonies or artifacts is common.

Kanban Methodology

Kanban is a workflow management method aimed at maximizing efficiency through visualization. The central tool used is a kanban board - a visual representation of a team's workflow divided into columns representing each phase.

Work items (user stories, tasks, features) are represented visually on cards that are pulled through the workflow from left to right. This helps highlight bottlenecks and inefficiencies when the board becomes overloaded.

Some core kanban principles include:

• Visualize - Map out workflow and work to reveal inefficiencies.

• Limit Work In Progress (WIP) - Limit how much unfinished work moves through each workflow state at once.

• Manage Flow - Keep work flowing smoothly through the process to identify issues.

• Make Process Explicit - Define explicit process rules and states to improve collaboration.

• Implement Feedback Loops - Review metrics and issues regularly to identify areas for improvement.

• Improve Collaboratively - Change processes gradually in an evolutionary way through team consensus.

Applying Kanban

While simple in concept, applying kanban successfully takes some finesse. Teams must determine:

• The different software development workflow states that work will cycle through

• The maximum WIP limits for each state to prevent bottlenecks

• Classes of service that break down work item types with different processes

• The cadence for regular team reviews of workflow issues

• Implementing visual signals like color-coding work in progress that has exceeded WIP limits

• Metrics for monitoring cycle time, throughput, and other efficiency factors

Used properly, kanban helps organizations optimize their delivery processes.

Kanban vs Scrum

Kanban and scrum share some similarities but have different approaches:

• Roles - Scrum defines specific roles while kanban does not.

• Process - Kanban focuses on improving an existing process rather than defining a new one like scrum.

• Cadence - Scrum prescribes a sprint cadence while kanban operates as a continuous flow.

• Change philosophy - Kanban encourages evolutionary change versus Scrum's fixed-length sprints.

• Metrics - Kanban places greater emphasis on leveraging data and metrics to improve team performance.

Many teams combine kanban and scrum by using a kanban-style board to visualize workflow during a scrum sprint. This helps track progress within the timeboxed scrum events.

Limitations of Kanban

Some potential pitfalls of kanban include:

• Kanban works best when teams already have an established process. It can be difficult to implement from scratch.

• There is less emphasis on timeboxed delivery which can lead to reduced urgency.

• For larger initiatives, high-level roadmaps and milestones can be more difficult with kanban.

• Team commitment and buy-in is critical to make kanban successful. Without full adoption, benefits are limited.

• Similarly to scrum, kanban can difficult to employ effectively with large, distributed teams.

Agile Values and Principles

In addition to specific frameworks like scrum and kanban, it's important to understand the Agile Manifesto - the philosophical foundation for agile software development methodologies.

Published in 2001, the manifesto established 4 key values and 12 principles to guide agile teams:

Agile Values

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

• Working software over comprehensive documentation

• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation 

• Responding to change over following a plan

Agile Principles

• Customer satisfaction through early and continuous software delivery

• Accommodate changing requirements throughout development

• Frequent delivery of working software

• Collaboration between the business stakeholders and developers

• Support, trust, and motivate the people involved

• Enable face-to-face interactions

• Working software is the primary measure of progress

• Agile processes to support a consistent development pace

• Attention to technical detail and design enhances agility

• Simplicity

• Self-organizing teams encourage great architectures, requirements, and designs

• Regular reflections on how to become more effective

Applying Agile Values

Putting agile values into practice goes beyond implementing scrum, kanban, or other frameworks. Some ways to apply agile principles include:

• Empowering teams to make decisions - rather than top-down control

• Active user engagement through demos, collaboration, and feedback

• Focusing on working software versus documentation

• Embracing change throughout a project versus strict upfront planning

• Applying the right practices for your team and organization rather than following a prescribed formula

• Regular reflection on what's working well and what needs improvement

• Maintaining a sustainable pace and work-life balance

While frameworks provide the practices, the agile values and principles provide helpful philosophical guidance.

Scrum vs. Kanban vs. Lean vs. Agile

So with all these different approaches, how do you choose? Here are a few key points:

• Scrum excels for collaborative teams executing complex projects with rapidly changing or unclear requirements.

• Kanban helps visualize workflow and improve process efficiency especially for maintenance and operations.

• Lean provides excellent principles for any team to eliminate waste and deliver value quickly.

• The Agile values and principles should guide all of your agile implementations, regardless of framework.

The "right" methodology depends on your team, organization, project, and environment. Most teams find success not by implementing a single framework in full, but by combining practices from various approaches.

Focus first on agile values like collaboration and responding to change. Don't blindly follow a prescribed formula. The best results come from choosing whatever practices maximize your team's effectiveness and minimize waste.

Experiment to find the right mix of scrum events, lean principles, kanban boards, and agile values for your unique circumstances.

Key Takeaways for Choosing Your Agile Approach

• Scrum provides an excellent lightweight framework for complex projects with unclear requirements that change often. But consider scaling approaches when adopting scrum across multiple teams.

• Lean principles like optimizing the whole and eliminating waste can improve any process. But lean may not provide enough concrete structure for some team's taste.

• Kanban improves visualization and exposes inefficiencies especially for teams focused on operations and maintenance work. But it can be difficult to implement fully without a preexisting process.

• The Agile values and principles should guide your agile adoption. But don't become so dogmatic that you lose pragmatism.

• Most teams succeed by combining aspects of scrum, lean, and kanban in a way that best suits their particular circumstances.

By truly understanding Scrum, Lean, Kanban and Agile values, you can create an approach tailored to your team and organization. This flexibility helps unlock agile’s full potential for delivering outstanding products that customers love.