What is a Scrum Board?
Scrum is a widely used framework that helps divide complex problems into smaller tasks. The Scrum board is a project management tool that visually displays these tasks and Scrum sprints. It serves as the focal point in every sprint meeting for regular updates and shows how your work is divided across various workflow stages.
The Scrum board constantly gets updated by the team members and displays all the tasks that should be completed by the end of the Scrum project.
Like dashboards and timeline views, the Scrum board is one such project management tool that helps you analyze what’s going on with your Scrum project and team members.
Scrum board is specifically designed to support Scrum as the report suggested that 84% of the company adopting the Agile methodologies, and 78% use the Scrum framework to implement it.
Scrum boards can be created both virtually and physically. However, virtual Scrum boards come with numerous benefits, such as it being pretty easy to update and display the task status in real-time.
In short, the Scrum board can:
- Help to organize the Scrum and sprint backlog along with the individual user stories
- Define the workflow to the Scrum team
- Enable to identify the potential bottlenecks in the project process.
What is the Difference Between a Scrum and Kanban Board?
Kanban board is a project management tool started at Toyota and is quite similar to Scrum boards. The Kanban board divides the workflow of the sprint into different sections such as:
- To do
- Work in progress
- Work under testing
- Complete
The primary aim of the Kanban board is to manage the volume of work through each section of the project. Your Scrum board will be similar to the Kanban board, depending on how your team works with Scrum methodology.
However, the significant difference between the Scrum board and Kanban board is that the Scrum board is frequently used in Agile Software development; in contrast, Kanban boards are often used by every team in organizations.
Let us discuss some other differences between Kanban Board and Scrum board in detail below:
1. Scope of Work
Kanban board: Using the Kanban board, you can trace the workflow of team members working on the project. Further, as required, the team members add and update all the tasks from the “to-do” to the “complete” section.
Scrum board: Simultaneously, the Scrum board traces and manages a single Scrum team’s discrete part of a single sprint.
2. Timeline
Kanban board: It works continuously and usually has a fixed limit to the number of tasks that the team can have. Being customizable, the Kanban board always avoids working as iterations and getting its jobs done by the team members.
Scrum Board: Scrum boards have a fixed timeline. Each sprint process consists of two weeks, and therefore, the Scrum board lasts for two weeks to finish its task.
3. Work in Progress
Kanban Board: The primary aim of the Kanban board is to improve the productivity of the Scrum team. Therefore, the “work in progress” column has a fixed number of tasks.
Scrum Board: As mentioned before, the Scrum team needs to complete a lot of tasks during one sprint cycle. Therefore, there are no limits on how many tasks can be added to the “work in progress” section. While there is no cap, it’s important to finish each task by the end of the sprint.
4. Board Content
Kanban Board: As the Kanban board is used by every organization, which also includes the non-technical teams, it does not consider user stories and sprint backlogs as sections or rows.
Scrum Board: Scrum team members break down the user stories and add them to the sprint backlog. Later, you can work on these sprint backlogs when the time is right.
5. Reports
Kanban Board: It is rarely used for creating reports and graphs for the project. The main objective of the Kanban board is to provide the workflow for the project’s progress to the team.
Scrum Board: On the other hand, you can use the Scrum data from the Scrum task board to create the reports and velocity charts of the project. Later, these charts measure the progress and number of tasks finished in a sprint cycle.
6. Ownership
Kanban Board: Every member of the organization uses a kanban board whether he belongs to technical background or not. Hence, it is owned by a department or the whole company.
Scrum Board: As a single team handles Scrum projects under any organization, only a few people have ownership of the Scrum board.
Originally published here.