What's the Difference? Agile vs Scrum vs Waterfall vs Kanban

From Agile to Scrum to Waterfall to Kanban, there are a variety of different project management frameworks. Some, like Scrum, follow a more rigid, structured methodology. Others, like Kanban, are easier to introduce and implement on top of existing processes. They all have pros and cons, so how do you know?which one to choose?

Agile Methodology

What Is Agile?

Agile software development is based on an incremental, iterative approach. Instead of in-depth planning at the beginning of the project, Agile methodologies are open to changing requirements over time and encourages constant feedback from the end users. Cross-functional teams work on iterations of a product over a period of time, and this work is organized into a backlog that is prioritized based on business or customer value. The goal of each iteration is to produce a working product.

In Agile methodologies, leadership encourages teamwork, accountability, and face-to-face communication. Business stakeholders and developers must work together to align the product with customer needs and company goals.?

12 Principles of Agile Methodology

1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through the early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
6. Face-to-face conversation is the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team.
7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.
8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
10. Simplicity -- the art of maximizing the amount of work not done -- is essential.
11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.?

Scrum Methodology

What Is Scrum Project Management?

Scrum is a subset of Agile and one of the most popular process frameworks for implementing Agile. It is an iterative software development model that leverages incremental processes included in a larger framework that uses cross-functional teams to meet goals and adapt to changes. Scrum aims to establish small pieces of a release faster in fixed-length iterations, called sprints, that last one to two weeks long. This allows the team to ship software on a regular cadence. At the end of each sprint, stakeholders and team members meet to plan the next steps.?

Scrum follows a set of roles, responsibilities, and meetings that never change. For example, Scrum calls for four ceremonies that provide structure to each sprint:?sprint planning, daily stand-up, sprint demo, and sprint retrospective. During each sprint, the team will use visual artifacts like task boards or burndown charts to show progress and receive incremental feedback.

This type of project management results in greater responsiveness to customers, lower costs of development, job satisfaction, and more immediate returns. Scrum is not a linear process, but rather, a fluid practice that takes many moving parts, teams, and goals into consideration as it progresses.

Jeff Sutherland created the Scrum process in 1993, taking the term “Scrum” from an analogy in a 1986 study by Takeuchi and Nonaka published in the Harvard Business Review. In the study, Takeuchi and Nonaka compare high-performing, cross-functional teams to the Scrum formation used by Rugby teams. The original context for this was manufacturing, but Sutherland, along with John Scumniotales and Jeff McKenna, adapted the model for software development.

Advantages of Scrum

Scrum is a highly prescriptive framework with specific roles and ceremonies. While it can be a lot to learn, these rules have a lot of advantages. The benefits of Scrum include:

• More transparency and project visibility:?With daily stand-up meetings, the whole team knows who is doing what, eliminating many misunderstandings and confusion. Issues are identified in advance, allowing the team to resolve them before they get out of hand.
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• Increased team accountability:?There is no project manager telling the?Scrum Team?what to do and when. Instead, the team collectively decides what work they can complete in each sprint. They all work together and help each other, improving collaboration and empowering each team member to be independent.?
• Easy to accommodate changes:?With short sprints and constant feedback, it’s easier to cope with and accommodate changes. For example, if the team discovers a new user story during one sprint, they can easily add that feature to the next sprint during the backlog refinement meeting.
• Increased cost savings:?Constant communication ensures the team is aware of all issues and changes as soon as they arise, helping to lower expenses and increase quality. By coding and testing features in smaller chunks, there is continuous feedback and mistakes can be corrected early on, before they get too expensive to fix.

Disadvantages of Scrum

While Scrum offers some concrete benefits, it also has some downsides. Scrum requires a high level of experience and commitment from the team and projects can be at risk of scope creep.?

Here are the disadvantages of Scrum:?

• Risk of scope creep: Some?Scrum projects?can experience scope creep due to a lack of specific end date. With no completion date, stakeholders may be tempted to keep requesting additional functionality.?
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• Team requires experience and commitment:?With defined roles and responsibilities, the team needs to be familiar with Scrum principles to succeed. Because there are no defined roles in the Scrum Team (everyone does everything), it requires team members with technical experience. The team also needs to commit to the daily?Scrum meetings?and stay on the team for the project duration.
• The wrong Scrum Master can ruin everything:?The?Scrum Master?is very different from a project manager. The Scrum Master does not have authority over the team; he or she needs to trust the team they are managing and never tell them what to do. If the Scrum Master tries to control the team, the project will fail.
• Poorly defined tasks can lead to inaccuracies:?Project costs and timelines won’t be accurate if tasks are not well defined. If the initial goals are unclear, planning becomes difficult and sprints can take more time than originally estimated.

Roles in Scrum

There are three specific roles in Scrum. They are:

• Product Owner:?The?Scrum Product Owner?has a vision of what he or she wants to build and conveys that vision to the team. The?Product Owner?focuses on business and market requirements, prioritizing all the work needed. He or she builds and manages the backlog, provides guidance on which features to ship next, and interacts with the team and other stakeholders to make sure everyone understands the items in the product backlog. The Product Owner is not a project manager. Instead of managing the status and progress, his or her job is to motivate the team with a goal and vision.?
• Scrum Master:?Often considered the coach for the team, the Scrum Master helps the team do their best possible work. This means organizing meetings, dealing with roadblocks and challenges, and working with the Product Owner to ensure the product backlog is ready for the next sprint. The Scrum Master also makes sure the team follows the Scrum process. He or she doesn’t have authority over the team members, but he or she does have authority over the process. For example, the Scrum Master can’t tell someone what to do, but could propose a new sprint cadence.?
• Scrum Team: The Scrum Team is comprised of five to seven members. Everyone on the project works together, helps each other, and shares a deep sense of camaraderie. Unlike traditional development teams, there are not distinct roles like programmer, designer, or tester. Everyone completes the set of work together. The Scrum Team owns the plan for each sprint; they anticipate how much work they can complete in each iteration.?

Steps in the Scrum Process

There are a specific, unchanging set of steps in the Scrum flow. They include:

• Product backlog: The Product Owner and Scrum Team meet to prioritize the items on the product backlog (the work on the product backlog comes from user stories and requirements). The product backlog is not a list of things to be completed, but rather it is a list of all the desired features for the product. The development team then pulls work from the product backlog to complete during each sprint.
• Sprint planning:?Before each sprint, the Product Owner presents the top items on the backlog to the team in a sprint planning meeting. The team then chooses which work they can complete during the sprint and moves the work from the product backlog to the sprint backlog (which is a list of tasks to complete in the sprint).
• Backlog refinement/grooming:?At the end of one sprint, the team and Product Owner meet to make sure the backlog is ready for the next sprint. The team may remove user stories that aren’t relevant, create new stories, reassess the priority of stories, or split user stories into smaller tasks. The purpose of this “grooming” meeting is to ensure the backlog only contains relevant and detailed items that meet the project’s objectives.
• Daily Scrum meetings:?The?Daily Scrum?is a 15-minute stand-up meeting where each team member talks about their goals and any issues that have come up. The Daily Scrum happens every day during the sprint and helps keep the team on track.
• Sprint review meeting:?At the end of each sprint, the team presents the work they have completed at a sprint review meeting. This meeting should feature a live demonstration, not a report or a PowerPoint presentation.?
• Sprint retrospective meeting:?Also at the end of each sprint, the team reflects on how well Scrum is working for them and talks about any changes that need to be made in the next sprint. The team may talk about what went well during the sprint, what went wrong, and what they could do differently.

Waterfall Methodology

What Is Waterfall?

Waterfall methodology follows a sequential, linear process and is the most popular version of the systems development life cycle (SDLC) for software engineering and IT projects. It is sometimes planned using a Gantt chart, a type of bar chart that shows the start and end dates for each task. Once one of the eight stages are complete, the development team moves onto the next step. The team can’t go back to a previous stage without starting the whole process from the beginning. And, before the team can move to the next stage, requirements may need to be reviewed and approved by the customer.

The Waterfall model originated in the manufacturing and construction industries, both highly structured environment where changes can be too expensive or sometimes impossible. The first formal description of Waterfall is attributed to Winston W. Royce in a 1970 article where he described a flawed software model.?

Advantages of Waterfall

Waterfall is best used for simple, unchanging projects. Its linear, rigid nature makes it easy to use and allows for in-depth documentation.?

The advantages of Waterfall include:

• Easy to use and manage:?Because the Waterfall model follows the same sequential pattern for each project, it is easy to use and understand. The team doesn’t need any prior knowledge or training before working on a Waterfall project. Waterfall is also a rigid model; each phase has specific deliverables and review, so it’s easy to manage and control.
• Discipline is enforced: Every phase in Waterfall has a start and end point, and it’s easy to share progress with stakeholders and customers. By focusing on requirements and design before writing code, the team can reduce the risk of a missed deadline.
• Requires a well documented approach:?Waterfall requires documentation for every phase, resulting in better understanding of the logic behind the code and tests. It also leaves a paper trail for any future projects or if stakeholders need to see more detail about a certain phase.?

Disadvantages of Waterfall

The biggest drawback of Waterfall is how it handles change. Because Waterfall is a linear, sequential model, you can’t bounce between phases, even if unexpected changes occur. Once you’re done with a phase, that’s it.?

Here’s more information on the disadvantages of Waterfall:

• Changes can’t be easily accommodated:?Once the team completes a phase, they can’t go back. If they reach the testing phase and realize that a feature was missing from the requirements phase, it is very difficult and expensive to go back and fix it.?
• Software isn’t delivered until late: The project has to complete two to four phases before the coding actually begins. As a result, stakeholders won’t see working software until late in the life cycle.
• Gathering accurate requirements can be challenging:?One of the first phases in a Waterfall project is to talk to customers and stakeholders and identify their requirements. However, it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly what they want this early in the project. Often times, customers don’t know what they want early on and instead, learn and identify requirements as the project progresses.

Stages of Waterfall

There are eight stages in Waterfall and they must all happen in sequential order. For example, the development team can’t go back to the analysis phase if they are in the testing phase.

1. Conception: This phase starts with an idea. The concept phase involves a rough assessment of the project, why it’s beneficial, and looks at any initial cost estimates.?
2. Initiation: Once the idea is formed, you need to hire the project team, and define objectives, scope, purpose, and deliverables.
3. Requirement Gathering and Analysis:?Requirements are gathered and analyzed to see if the project is actually feasible. All this information is documented in a requirement specification document.?
4. Design:?The design specifications created in this phase are used in the coding phase to actually write the code. The requirements are studied and evaluated, and the design of the system is prepared. The team’s goal is to understand what actions need to be taken and what they should look like.
5. Implementation/Coding:?The actual coding of the software begins. Any flowcharts or algorithms created in the design phase are translated into a programming language.
6. Testing:?Once the code is complete, the software needs to be tested for any errors. When the testing is finished, the software is delivered to the customer. Some teams may choose to include user acceptance testing (UAT), where users test the software before it is deployed to the general public.
7. Maintenance:?Once customers have been using the software in the real world, they may find additional problems. The development team will need to resolve, change, or modify the software to continue to be effective.

Iterative Waterfall Development

In the traditional Waterfall model, the team goes through each phase for the entire project. For example, they do the analysis for the entire project, then they do the design for the entire project, etc.?

In an iterative Waterfall model, there is still a lot of upfront planning required. Once the plan is in place, the team follows the same pattern as traditional Waterfall but does it for each story. They do the analysis for one story, then all the design for one story, then all the coding and testing for one story. Then they repeat the process for another story. The work is broken up into chunks that benefit the development team.?

How Waterfall Deals with Software Requirements

Waterfall projects define all software requirements upfront. The project cannot proceed unless these requirements have been identified and documented.

Some Waterfall projects may have a dedicated team to capture, collect, and gather these requirements. They may use questionnaires, face-to-face or phone interviews, whiteboards, and?software tools?to capture stakeholder and customer requirements.

Once the initial requirements are defined, the team should produce a requirements specification document (sometimes they may create more than one). This document defines what needs to be delivered so everyone understands the scope of the project.?

When to Use Waterfall

Because of its highly structured nature, Waterfall is best used in industries where firm tasks and deadlines need to be set and maintained. For example, the manufacturing and construction industries are two highly rigid businesses that rely on the timely completion of dependent stages.

Changes to these plans can be expensive, and in some instances, impossible. As a result, Waterfall is leveraged to preserve a sequential process and maintain stability throughout the stages of a project.

Kanban

What Is Kanban?

Kanban is Japanese for “visual sign” or “card.” It is a visual framework used to implement Agile that shows what to produce, when to produce it, and how much to produce. It encourages small, incremental changes to your current system and does not require a certain set up or procedure (meaning, you could overlay Kanban on top of other existing workflows).

Kanban ?was inspired by the Toyota Production System and Lean Manufacturing. In the 1940s, Toyota improved its engineering process by modeling it after how supermarkets stock shelves. Engineer Taiichi Ohno noticed that supermarkets stock just enough product to meet demand, optimizing the flow between the supermarket and customer. Inventory would only be restocked when there was empty space on the shelf (a visual cue).?And because inventory matched consumption, the supermarket improved efficiency in inventory management.

Toyota brought these same principles to its factory floors. Different teams would create a card (or Kanban) to communicate that they had extra capacity and were ready to pull more materials. Because all requests for parts were pulled from the order, Kanban is sometimes called the “pull system.”?

These same ideas apply to software teams and IT projects today. In this context, development work-in-progress (WIP) takes the place of inventory, and new work can only be added when there is an “empty space” on the team’s visual Kanban board. Kanban matches the amount of WIP to the team’s capacity, improving flexibility, transparency, and output.

According to the?Kanban blog, “Kanban is a technique for managing a software development process in a highly efficient way. Kanban underpins Toyota's ‘just-in-time’ (JIT) product system. Although producing software is a creative activity and therefore different to mass-producing cars, the underlying mechanism for managing the production line can still be applied.”

When looking at Kanban vs Agile, it’s important to remember that Kanban is one flavor of Agile. It’s one of many frameworks used to implement Agile software development.

About the Kanban Board

A Kanban board is a tool to implement the Kanban method for projects. Traditionally, this tool has been a physical board, with magnets, plastic chips, or sticky notes on a whiteboard to represent work items. However, in recent years, more and more?project management software tools?have created online Kanban boards.

A Kanban board, whether it is physical or online, is made up of different swim lanes or columns. The simplest boards have three columns: to do, in progress, and done. The columns for a software development project may consist of backlog, ready, coding, testing, approval, and done columns.

Kanban cards?(like sticky notes) represent the work and each card is placed on the board in the lane that represents the status of that work. These cards communicate status at a glance. You could also use different color cards to represent different details. For example, green cards could represent a feature and orange cards could represent a task.

Advantages of Kanban

Kanban’s visual nature offers a unique advantage when implementing Agile. The Kanban board is easy to learn and understand, it improves flow of work, and minimizes cycle time.?

The advantages of Kanban include:

• Increases flexibility: Kanban is an evolving, fluid model. There are no set phase durations and priorities are reevaluated as new information comes in.?
• Reduces waste: Kanban revolves around reducing waste, ensuring that teams don’t spend time doing work that isn’t needed or doing the wrong kind of work.?
• Easy to understand:?The visual nature of Kanban helps to make it incredibly intuitive and easy to learn. The team doesn’t need to learn a completely new methodology, and Kanban can be easily implemented on top of other systems in place.
• Improves delivery flow:?Kanban teams optimize the flow of work out to customers. Like continuous delivery (CD), Kanban focuses on the just-in-time delivery of value and delivering work to customers on a regular cadence.
• Minimizes cycle time: Cycle time is the amount of time it takes for work to move through the team’s workflow. In Kanban projects, the entire team helps to ensure the work is moving quickly and successfully through the process.

Disadvantages of Kanban

Many of the disadvantages associated with Kanban come with misuse or mishandling of the Kanban board. An outdated or overcomplicated board can lead to confusion, inaccuracies, or miscommunication.?

Here’s more on the disadvantages of Kanban:

• Outdated board can lead to issues: The team must be committed to keeping the Kanban board up to date, otherwise they’ll be working off inaccurate information. And once work is completed based on an out-of-date board, it can be hard to get things back on track.
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• Teams can overcomplicate the board:?The Kanban board should remain clear and easy to read, however, some team members may learn “new tricks” they can apply to their board. Adding these kinds of bells and whistles to the Kanban board just buries the important information.
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• Lack of timing:?A frequent complaint about Kanban is that you don’t know when things will be done. The columns on the Kanban board are only marked by phase (to do, in progress, complete), there are no timeframes associated with each phase, so you really don’t know how long the to do phase could last.

Core Practices and Principles of Kanban

Every Kanban project should follow these core principles:

• Visualize the workflow: A visual representation of your work allows you to understand the big picture and see how the flow of work progresses. By making all the work visible, including blockers and queues, you can identify issues early on and improve collaboration.
• Limit work in progress (WIP): Work in progress limits (WIP limits) determine the minimum and maximum amount of work for each column on the board or for each workflow. By putting a limit on WIP, you can increase speed and flexibility, and reduce the need for prioritizing tasks.?
• Manage and enhance the flow:?The flow of work (the movement of work) throughout the Kanban board should be monitored and improved upon. Ideally, you want a fast, smooth flow, which shows that the team is creating value quickly. The team should analyze problems in the flow then implement changes.
• Make process policies explicit:?In order for collaborative change to occur in the Kanban system, the processes need to be explicit. Everyone needs to understand how things work or what “done” really means. You can modify the board to make these processes more clear; for example, you could redesign it to specify how the work should flow.
• Continuously improve:?The Kanban method encourages small, continuous changes that stick. Once the Kanban system is in place, the team will be able to identify and understand issues and suggest improvements. Teams measure their effectiveness by tracking flow, measuring cycle time, and increasing the quality of work.

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