2.3 Agile, Scrum, Kanban

Agile is not a meeting schedule. It is a way to reduce the cost of being wrong by delivering small increments, learning from real feedback, and adapting.

Scrum and Kanban are common ways to organize that work, but they solve different problems.

Agile thinking

Agile thinking values:

• Working software over status reports that only describe progress.
• Collaboration with users and stakeholders over distant handoffs.
• Responding to change over pretending the first plan was perfect.
• Sustainable pace over heroic emergencies.

The mature version is disciplined. It uses tests, clear backlog refinement, small stories, definition of done, review, and continuous improvement.

The immature version replaces engineering with slogans.

Scrum

Scrum organizes work into time-boxed sprints. It usually includes a product owner, scrum master, developers, sprint planning, daily scrum, review, and retrospective.

Scrum works best when a team can create a meaningful sprint goal and deliver a potentially shippable increment. It struggles when work is mostly interrupt-driven, invisible, or impossible to slice.

Kanban

Kanban visualizes work, limits work in progress, manages flow, and improves continuously. It is often better when work arrives continuously, priorities change often, or the team maintains a service with interrupts.

The key Kanban question is not "How busy is everyone?" It is "How smoothly does work flow from request to done?"

Common warning signs

Watch for these warning signs:

• Standups where nobody changes a plan.
• Sprint goals that are just a list of unrelated tickets.
• Velocity used to pressure individuals.
• Work in progress growing while completed work stays flat.
• Retrospectives that produce no experiment for the next cycle.
• Kanban boards that visualize chaos but never limit it.

Good Agile makes learning frequent and work finishable.