How do you compare and contrast Kanban and waterfall methodologies?

1 What is Kanban?

Kanban is a lean and agile methodology that focuses on delivering value to customers in small and frequent increments. Kanban uses a visual system of cards, columns, and limits to represent the work items, stages, and capacity of a workflow. Kanban teams pull work from a prioritized backlog and aim to minimize waste, optimize flow, and respond to changes quickly.

2 What is waterfall?

Waterfall is a traditional and sequential methodology that follows a predefined and linear plan for delivering a project. Waterfall divides the project into distinct phases, such as requirements, design, development, testing, and deployment. Waterfall teams complete each phase before moving to the next and aim to avoid rework, ensure quality, and adhere to scope, time, and budget.

3 How are they different?

Kanban and waterfall differ in several aspects, such as flexibility, feedback, collaboration, and risk. Kanban is more flexible and encourages continuous feedback and improvement, fostering a collaborative and self-organizing culture. It also reduces the risk of delivering low-value or defective products by validating them early and often. On the other hand, waterfall is more rigid and resistant to deviations from the initial plan. It assigns specific roles and responsibilities to each team member, and relies on predefined milestones and deliverables for feedback and validation. This increases the risk of delivering late or unsatisfactory products by validating them only at the end.

4 How are they similar?

Kanban and waterfall have a few things in common, such as ensuring customer value, delivering quality products and services, and having effective communication among team members, stakeholders, and customers. Both methodologies are focused on solving customer problems or fulfilling customer needs, and they use various tools and techniques to guarantee quality. Clear and effective communication is essential for both methodologies to ensure expectations and goals are aligned.

6 When to use waterfall?

Waterfall is suitable for scenarios where customer requirements are clear and stable, work items are simple or standard, the team size is large or medium, team autonomy is low or moderate, and the delivery speed is slow or moderate.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?