Scrum or Kanban for individual projects and developers?

[Deleted user]

Hi there,

I have a team of of four developers. We are just starting out using JIRA and I'm having some trouble figuring out what agile framework we should use and how to structure our environment.

Normally, each developer has their own project and will do most of the work themselves on that project, however, there are times when they will collaborate on a project.

Their individual projects will vary in length and complexity and are not always prioritized weeks in advance (stakeholders will often make a new request that becomes the highest prioritized item and so one developer has to work on that).

So which framework is best, scrum or kanban? My thought was to use only one scrum project and each sprint will contain unrelated cards which the developers assign to themselves. Would this work? Or does the sprint need to have more related development in it? Would it be advantageous to have a kanban project as well? How would I use a kanban project and a scrum project at the same time if all my team members are in a sprint on the scrum project?

Thank you.

[Scott Theus]

Hi @[deleted] ,

Personally, I wouldn't say either methodology is better. It all depends on how your team operates. I have cross functional teams working in projects that are both Scrum and Kanban. 

Something to keep in mind...Boards are just visual representations of filters, so there is no reason to choose one over the other; you can set up both Scrum and Kanban boards in a single project. Also, whether the team uses Scrum or Kanban depends on how they operate and if their work is conducive to fitting into time boxed sprints; I've found that there are some things that can't be time boxed because portions of them are outside of the team's control. 

In your case I would set up the individual projects as Kanban and let the developer manage his own tasks through the workflow, and set up the shared projects as both Scrum and Kanban so the team can work in sprints on the stories that can be time boxed and in Kanban for those that cannot. 

I wrote an article that may help set this up and manage it through different boards:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Agile-articles/Managing-Multiple-Projects-in-a-Single-Board-or-One-Scrum-to/ba-p/1035297

-Scott'