I’ve been following some of the discussions on the differences between Scrum and Kanban. And learning more about Kanban, of course. One point that is emphasized a lot is that Kanban requires fewer up-front changes than Scrum does. The term “Big Change Up-Front”; has even been coined, by Alan Shalloway.
There’s certainly truth in that. Scrum doesn’t have many rules, but it is very strict in assigning a very limited set of roles and responsibilities. Kanban can be used with existing roles, as long as you make make sure you make the existing roles and policies explicit. Asking which one of those option is better is really beside the point. It simply depends on the context. In my situation, I usually get called in by companies who have already decided to ‘go Agile’, and as such are already part way through some of those changes. Of course, the changes are not always successful, but it doesn’t provide me with a change to start slowly.
Interesting discussion, of course, and for me it brought to mind Conway’s Game of Life. For those unfamiliar with it, this is a cellular automaton game, where a set of rules iteratively executed over a set of cells (with a state of on or off), where all kind of interesting stable and continuously changing patterns can occur based on the initial pattern put on the board.
Scrum could be compared with a fairly big and complex ‘breeder’ pattern, which needs to be placed on the board as a complete set. It’s quite an apt comparison in that the infinite growth belonging to such a pattern doesn’t happen if you get part of a breeder pattern wrong. And since you can see the Game of Life as a universal Turing machine, infinite growth means a continuous generation of information, which can be as continuous learning.
Kanban can start with an existing stable pattern (an oscillator), and can tweak that to move, step by step, towards breeder status. At least, that’s how I see it.
The analogy will probably break down after this initial thought, and might be made better if we move from comparing to patterns to comparing to rule-sets, but my brain started to hurt when I went along that route…