Agile, Scrum and Kanban in practice

The Agile mindset

The Agile Manifesto values individuals and interactions over processes and tools; working software over comprehensive documentation; customer collaboration over contract negotiation; and responding to change over following a plan. (The items on the right still matter; the left matters more.)

Scrum

Roles (accountabilities):

• Product owner: maximises value; owns and orders the product backlog.
• Scrum master: coaches the team and organisation on Scrum, removes impediments, facilitates events. A servant-leader, not a boss.
• Developers: the cross-functional team that builds the increment.

Events (in a fixed-length sprint, usually 1–4 weeks, commonly 2):

• Sprint planning: what can be done this sprint (the sprint goal) and how.
• Daily scrum (15 minutes): progress towards the sprint goal, plans for the day, blockers.
• Sprint review: demonstrate the increment to stakeholders; gather feedback; adapt the backlog.
• Sprint retrospective: how the team can improve its way of working.
• Backlog refinement (ongoing): clarify, split and estimate upcoming items.

Artefacts: product backlog (with the product goal), sprint backlog (with the sprint goal), and the increment (meeting the definition of done).

Kanban

Visualise work on a board (To do → In progress → Review → Done), limit work in progress (WIP) per column to expose bottlenecks and improve flow, and measure lead time, cycle time and throughput. No fixed sprints; great for support, operations and maintenance teams. Many teams combine Scrum and Kanban ("Scrumban").

Agile metrics

• Velocity: story points completed per sprint, for the team's own forecasting (never for comparing teams).
• Burndown chart: remaining work in a sprint over time. Burnup chart: completed work vs total scope (shows scope changes).
• Cycle time and lead time, throughput.
• Escaped defects, sprint goal success rate, team happiness.

Tools

Jira (boards, backlogs, sprints, reports), Azure DevOps, Trello, Asana, ClickUp, Monday.com, MS Project and Smartsheet for Gantt-heavy plans; Confluence or Notion for documentation; Slack or Teams for communication.

Check yourself

• What's the difference between a product owner and a scrum master?
• Why limit work in progress in Kanban?
• Your team's burndown chart is flat for the first half of the sprint. What might be happening?