Scrum vs Kanban

Don't fall into the trap of making a false choice. Rather think in terms of managing complexity (Scrum) and managing predictability and flow (Kanban). A team may well need to do both.

Hi @Marius!

May I recommend a resource for you?

Kanban and Scrum Together

Download the official Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams.

It's available on this site, scrum. org:



https://www.scrum.org/resources/kanban-guide-scrum-teams

Kanban vs Scrum

"Kanban is a strategy for optimizing flow. The practices in the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams help enhance and complement the Scrum framework and its implementation"

Check it out, and as @Ian says, learn how to use Scrum to manage complexity, and use Kanban to manage flow!

 

1)I wonder when do you choose Scrum over Kanban?

You choose Kanban and not Scrum when it is impossible to plan a Sprint and/or create a Sprint Goal. A common example would be an IT helpdesk. "Help, I can't start my PC anymore" is not a PBI you can add to the Product backlog, refine, prioritize and wait for Sprint Backlog to choose or not choose. No, it needs to be added to the list of Work Items immediately, and as soon as you can, the team needs to pick it up. Kanban can be a solution for teams that have this kind of work items / workflow.

2)This curiosity started after seeing new teams of 2-3 members adopting a custom Scrum instead of Kanban. Is Kanban "that" inferior?

I'm guessing you see them add Planning, Review and/or Retrospective to their practices, on top of the daily meeting they were already doing. That is not them choosing Scrum, it's adding the meetings that are proposed in Kanban, and that actually look like the meetings we have in Scrum.

3) Also I believe that Kanban would be better for teams working on continous updates / improvements / maintenance of software products. Am I very further away from the truth?

As I said: The one case it is absolutely clear when you choose Kanban and not Scrum is when you can't plan work. But make sure it's not laziness or "we're agile, we don't plan".

4) Do you have any empiric studies that shows how a Scrum team got better results than when it was Kanban or viceversa?

I do not. But they may exist.

For closing: as Darcy already mentioned, you can be using Scrum and Kanban together.

If you use flow metrics with Scrum, your sprints will get batter!

If you use Scrum as an inspect and adapt takt with Kanban, Kanban will get better!

Read up on PSK class on scrum.org and some of the blogs about Kanban on this site. 

Even if this topis more than one week old, I would to answer the questions, because I think, there are some misunderstandings here.

1)I wonder when do you choose Scrum over Kanban?

It is not easy to answer that question. Scrum has values, rules, artifacts etc. that you normally don't need in Kanban. With Scrum, you are changing your development process completely and adding a new process over the scrum framework with the goal to improve it continously. If you have already an established process, you can use Kanban as a tool for gathering more information about the process and find it's weaknesses. You also don't need any kind of agile mindset for it, because Kanban is not mainly a agile method, methodology or framework. It's a lean tool. 

2)This curiosity started after seeing new teams of 2-3 members adopting a custom Scrum instead of Kanban. Is Kanban "that" inferior?

What is a custom Scrum ;) ? Is it something like working in sprints, having something like a planing, a demo and having every day a daily? In Scrum, you have to follow the whole scrum guide, otherwise you are doing not scrum. Kanban hasn't such rules. You are starting normally a kanban board, documenting your steps through your progress and adding later one some kanban cadences, if you think, it's necessary. You are adopting and improving exisiting projects, mainly without changing it. That can't be done with scrum. 

3) Also I believe that Kanban would be better for teams working on continous updates / improvements / maintenance of software products. Am I very further away from the truth?

Your believe is more a result of your experience. I have exact the opposite experience (not opinion). I saw it more often, that the product owner talks a lot of the customers about the already released software product and discuss with him improvements and bugs, taking them back in the backlog and refine that with the devs. Kanban has its origin in the Toyota production, which has nothing to do with software development. Also, my current company uses Kanban in production. 

But again: It's my current experience in the industry. I am convinced, that Scrum and Kanban work both in software and hardware development. 

4) Do you have any empiric studies that shows how a Scrum team got better results than when it was Kanban or viceversa?

No, and I also don't think, that they exists and are really representative. It's like comparing apples with oranges. Both have different kind of methods even if they look similar and can be used together. They focus on different aspects in work. It's depended on the work and the mindset of people, which method / framework will have better results.