What’s the Difference Between Kanban vs. Scrum?

Project management has many moving parts, and team collaboration and integration of these moving parts is quite challenging. Without intuitive software to guide projects, managers and team members can easily end up shaking their heads in utter confusion.

Software development and other project management teams need all the help they can get when managing these complex projects. Enter the Jira board.

Before we delve deeper into the Jira board, please understand that the topics we cover are just the tip of the iceberg. But unlike the Titanic, there is no room for disasters here — only streamlining your successes!

In this article, we'll cover what Jira boards are, how to create, configure, and navigate the boards, and how to approach reporting, project sidebars, the cross-project board, and using the Scrum and Kanban backlogs.

Adopting Jira boards increases productivity, promotes teamwork, and improves the overall management of any Scrum or Kanban project.

With this kind of support, it's easy to produce outstanding outcomes.

Overview of Jira boards

The Jira board is an Atlassian creation that has become the go-to tool for team collaboration. Jira boards are versatile and practical, allowing teams to streamline their WIP limits and optimize their workflow.

Teams welcome software like Jira to help them control the iterative nature of their projects. The upshot is that project teams deliver high-quality work and exceed customer expectations. Not bad, right?

Anyone can create and use either the Scrum or Kanban Jira board to support their agile methodology and manage iterative, constraining work-in-progress, and monitoring of project processes for optimum value-driven outcomes.

There are two Jira boards: one for each of the Scrum and Kanban agile methodologies. Each software automation board provides an overview of the project, making it easy to see a status snapshot of the work in progress.

Scrum teams work in sprints where individuals must complete tasks in realistic timeframes. Team members capture all backlogs, sprints, and reports on their boards, making work collaboration and integration more straightforward.

Similarly, teams using the Kanban agile methodology get to experience the benefits of Jira boards and reduce their amount of work. Kanban boards also focus primarily on the backlog and reporting functions.

However, the difference between the boards for these agile methodologies is that Scrum highlights iterative work, and Kanban focuses on the workflow, which means managing the workload through work constraints.

Key features and practices of a Kanban Board

Visual workflow representation

Kanban boards use columns to represent distinct phases of a workflow. Each column signifies a step in the process, from task inception to completion. This visual representation helps teams understand their capacity and manage their workload effectively.

Continuous flow

One of the key principles of Kanban is maintaining a continuous flow of tasks. Unlike other methodologies that rely on fixed iterations, Kanban encourages the progression of tasks through each workflow stage in a steady, uninterrupted manner.

Work in progress (WIP) limits

Setting WIP limits is critical in Kanban practice. This means capping the number of tasks that can occupy a column simultaneously. By doing so, teams can pinpoint bottlenecks and inefficiencies more easily, facilitating smoother task transitions and more predictable delivery times.

Task cards

Each task or work item is represented by a card on the board. These cards can include details such as descriptions, deadlines, assignees, and priority levels. This allows team members to quickly grasp the status and requirements of each task.

Continuous improvement

Kanban promotes continuous improvement (Kaizen) through regular reviews and feedback loops. Teams are encouraged to consistently evaluate their processes and outcomes to identify areas for enhancement.

Flexibility and customization

Kanban boards can be tailored to fit the unique workflows and requirements of any team. From customizing columns to aligning WIP limits, teams have the freedom to configure the board to best suit their specific needs and goals.

Key features and practices of a Scrum Board

Scrum Board

This board is great for teams that like to work in sprints, or time-boxed periods when a team works to complete a set amount of work.

Scrum

Ideology: Learn through experiences and reflect on wins and losses to improve.

Cadence: Regular, fixed-length sprints (i.e., two weeks).

Select Features

• Insights: Use insights to optimize sprint planning, make daily stand-ups more meaningful, and improve delivery velocity.
• Backlog: The backlog is home to all of your team's potential work items for the project.
• Sprint: A sprint is a time-boxed period when a scrum team works to complete a set amount of work. Create a sprint, define its goals, and add all the issues from the backlog that your team intends to complete during a sprint.

Navigating the Scrum and Kanban Jira boards

A Jira board shows everything you need to know about a software project. You need a board to track team software activities and collaborate accountably. As any team member knows, this is the backbone of working well together.

In case it isn’t yet clear, these boards help you achieve those goals.

Both these methodologies work for Jira boards, whether your focus is on sprints or constraining the current work.

If you select Kanban for your project, you must enable the backlog feature. Whichever methodology your team prefers, you can use the issue detail view to determine progress immediately and enhance functionality.

Let’s take a look at what the Jira board offers.

1. Jira software board creation

Once you start a project, the software creates a Jira board template automatically. You will need to activate the “Create Shared Objects” feature to allow access to the new board. Alternatively, you can use the 'View All Boards' feature to copy an existing board.

You don’t need to adjust sharing permissions for an existing project board, as the software automatically creates a board for a new project. Once you create your new project, you add the relevant team members to the Jira board.

You also don’t need sharing permission if you copy a board, as all the original users can automatically access the copy until you make changes in line with permission parameters.

However, you’ll use the same issue filter when copying an existing board. You will be the board's administrator, but you may want to select a new filter, as you can't change the original one. Additionally, you can create custom fields to sync with project requirements.

Remember — choose one methodology before you create a board, as it is not possible to switch after starting a new project.

After creating a board, you can share the link with the team, which you will find under the “View All Boards” tab. Best of all, you save all your projects in the Jira software cloud, lowering overall project risks and saving space.

2. Board configuration

Configuration allows you to express your creativity in new and practical ways that benefit the overall project. Only Jira or board administrators can configure Jira boards.

You get to customize the board to align with project outcomes, and you have several configuration options to meet your goals.

You can literally configure everything on the Jira board, from the filters to the ranking, columns, swimlanes, issue detail view, and other elements. This is your chance to shine as you use the tool to express your creative side.

Have fun mapping the workflow on the board. Keep track of statuses, and use color to enhance the board’s readability so everyone on the team can see what they need to do and when. Plus, board configuration is intuitive, making it enjoyable to use this software.

3. Using the Scrum backlog

In the backlog, you have two sections — the sprints and the backlog. You can create issues and keep these current or delete them when complete.

Because Jira is user-friendly, you can drag and drop any issue into rankings, sprints, organizing stories into epics, or anywhere else you wish to assign them.

Only specific issues are visible in this section. For instance, issues such as sub-tasks or those that sync with a saved filter are visible. But if you map the status of all the issues to a specific column such as a Done column, they won’t be visible in this section.

When planning a backlog, note that various functions have different permission requirements. Only project administrators can initiate sprints, for example, but they can grant permissions to others.

4. Active sprints

The Scrum board uses active sprints, whereas Kanban uses a “monitoring work” feature. Active sprints on the Scrum board deal with current teamwork iterations. As with the planning mode, administrators can manage issues, dragging and dropping them into the workflow or elsewhere as necessary.

These boards update twice every minute, and the same concept applies as in the plan mode. Some issues on the active sprints will be visible, and others will be invisible. Software developers should be able to figure out the differences quickly, since they deal with this kind of thing regularly.

Again, this part of the Jira board is comprehensive. active sprints allow you to generate and move issues to different columns. Managing active sprints keeps the project current and informs team members of the status of each issue, whether in transition, flagged, or if there is a change in its ranking.

5. Getting familiar with the Kanban backlog

Image credit: Atlassian

Remember that the Kanban backlog is only accessible when the software administrator enables this feature for an assignee.

A small number of issues are easy to manage in this section, but as these increase, it becomes more challenging to address them. This excess volume of issues is a nightmare without software, but you can escape this drama with ease. Easy Agile has a suite of products aimed at helping you manage project issues.

Administrators can create and plan their Kanban project as they want by moving the issues to the hidden Versions section or Epics in the expanded panel. You can also move issues between this section and the “Selected for Development” areas per planning requirements.

Like Scrum, some project board issues in Kanban will be visible or invisible. Visibility and invisibility of issues primarily depend on filter, issue matches, and this section's status.

Team members can concentrate their efforts on their current work separate from the planning section to avoid distraction. The separation of these elements helps team members to focus on issues that need immediate attention.

But none of this information should come as a surprise, as Atlassian has invested more than a decade into developing precision software to make your job much easier.

6. Kanban monitoring

Instead of active sprints, Kanban monitors project progress on its principle of continuous delivery. The project administrator tracks tasks and works in progress to ensure that team members stay in control of their software development.

Use this board if your team focuses on managing and constraining work-in-progress.

Many other actions are possible on this project board, including estimating stories (this is one of the really fun parts), user stories, creating sub-tasks, filtering, releasing, and hiding issues.

As team members complete tasks, the administrator pulls new ones from the work in progress section to constrain pressure and support quality deliveries.

Like active sprints, the administrator can prioritize and rank issues for their Kanban project.

The Kanban software administrator can also maintain complete control over a board or allow specific permissions for editing, as with the other board.

Ultimately, the Kanban board presents a bird’s eye view of the project in progress, allowing for close monitoring of issues at any point.

As hinted at earlier, little of the project board’s potential can be explained in one article. If you want to upskill yourself on this software, many sources can help you achieve your goal.

7. Reporting

One of the most fundamental aspects of projects is reporting (as y’all should know). Luckily, Atlassian allows for a comprehensive reporting function on Jira boards for both Scrum and Kanban.

Some of the Scrum reports include the burndown, burnup, and sprint charts. You will also find control charts, epic reports, the cumulative flow diagram, velocity chart, and a version report available, among others.

Kanban reporting features encompass the control chart and the cumulative flow diagram.

Additional general reports like the recently created issues report, time tracking report, and many others are available for general issue analyses.

The change log and status report are available in Confluence if you connect your Jira software to other programs.

As you can see, reporting is an inherent feature of the Jira board, which helps you connect with and inform everyone of a project position at any point.

8. Using the project sidebar

The project sidebar on the top-right of the board is your go-to section for everything about your project.

Select any tab in the project’s sidebar to view the backlog, reports, or anything relating to the current project. You can view most project details from this starting point, including epics, stories, issues, and more specifics.

Get familiar with the instant filter in the backlog to search for issues with a search term such as “issue type” or “issue key.”

A quick filter is also available to narrow your search for software work items that you are handling, including WIP limits, use cases, and more, adding to the overall versatility of the Jira board.

It should be clear by now that these boards are as creative and versatile as any project team — take advantage of the opportunity to up the ante.

9. The cross-project board

A Jira board may include access to a software project add-on that does not work with Jira software. Either methodology board might also have multiple projects.

When you see additional projects linked to a software board, you can navigate to the one that interests you. Select the project header and choose the cross-project tab, which will enable you to view project details in the sidebar.

Alternatively, you can navigate to a cross-project from the top-right board header. Using this option means that you won’t see details since the program cannot read project info from this perspective.

Adopting the Jira board: A new world of possibilities

If you’re looking at improving team collaboration, project software integration, and management, the Jira board offers a new world of possibilities.

When you want your team to master a popular agile methodology, the Jira board promotes learning and productivity, whether you opt to use Kanban or Scrum.

If you want to become an expert in Atlassian Jira software boards, take your projects to a new level with Easy Agile apps for Jira.

Easy Agile apps such as Easy Agile TeamRhythm, Roadmaps, and Easy Agile Programs make it practical and simple to engage with Jira boards by offering flexible and collaborative solutions.

Software developers also get the benefit behind years of developing these apps to support the creation of quality solutions for their clients.

Scrum isn't the only agile software development methodology out there. 😲 If you're not familiar with Kanban, we promise we’re not going rogue — Kanban is agile. And, Jira project management tools make organizing a Kanban team really simple.

Kanban originates from Lean principles and focuses on eliminating waste and evaluating processes throughout the entire project lifecycle rather than just at the end. The key fundamentals of Lean are purpose, process, and people. Sounds pretty agile, doesn't it?

Jira project management tools help you get off to a great start with Kanban. You can use the default Jira boards or go crazy with customizations. It’s up to you and your team.

If you're not sure whether Kanban or Scrum is right for your company, keep reading. We'll give you some information to help you decide. We'll also share some tips on how to use Jira project management tools to keep your work organized and your team productive.

Which is best: Scrum or Kanban?

Both. Or, neither. Scrum and Kanban are both effective methodologies for developing software. Which is best for your organization is a better way to ask the question. The answer depends on the kind of work or project types assigned to your team.

Scrum is generally recommended when:

• Your project is relatively stable, meaning you can go a few weeks without a major change in requirements, features, or general product direction.
• The majority of your team's work items are complex features or significant product updates rather than small tweaks, bug fixes, or reactionary work from external feedback.
• You can plan your work a few weeks in advance, generally without significant changes in scope or requirements.
• You have a cross-functional team, willing and able to tackle work as a team rather than individually.

If the following sounds more like your software development team, you should consider Kanban:

• Your work is dynamic with frequent changes in priority.
• You're normally working on small updates, bug fixes, or responding to customer demands.
• Your team resources are shared across multiple projects or products.
• Most of your team members work independently because you generally don't need to collaborate.

Finally, you should consider Waterfall 😲 if:

• Your work is predictable or repetitious (annual updates or regularly scheduled upgrades).
• You're 100% familiar with the work, the technology, and the desired outcome.
• There's little chance of scope or requirement changes.
• There is an absolute path from start to finish required by legal or regulatory compliance standards.

Look, we love agile as much as anyone. But we don't let our passion for Scrum and Kanban get in the way of creating the best possible work environment for our teams. The best software methodology and process is the one that best suits your team.

How to get started with a Kanban project in Jira

Atlassian created a great platform to help Jira users manage Kanban teams. Step 1 is choosing the Kanban template when you create your new project. Easy peasy. 🤓

Next, you'll want to set up your Kanban workflow. Jira creates a default workflow for you: Backlog, Selected for Development, In Progress, and Done. The default works great for a lot of teams, but if you want to customize it, click the dot menu in the upper right corner and click “Board Settings.”

The board settings let you go nuts customizing:

• Columns and quick filters
• Swimlanes and card colors
• Card and issue detail views
• Prioritization ranks
• Working days
• Integrating the board with a roadmap.

One of the goals of Kanban is to help isolate areas in your process in real-time that are slowing down the delivery of work. Keep this in mind as you think about each step in your process and decide which steps need a column in the workflow.

To keep from having 20 columns on your board, consider combining related steps or grouping sequential steps that typically happen very quickly.

Let’s talk about WIP limits

Now that you have built your Kanban board, it’s time to set WIP limits. (That's work-in-progress for the novices.) WIP limits restrict you from overloading a stage in the workflow with too much work.

Let's talk about the purpose of a WIP limit. WIP limits help your team stay focused on a single task at a time so they can complete it, deploy it, and move on to the next task.

A lot of items in progress tend to distract people. They work on one task for a little while, then switch to another task, finishing neither and deploying nothing. 😕 That's called context-switching, and it'll suck the life out of your productivity.

WIP limits also show you bottlenecks in your process. Depending on your workflow, you may see work stacking up in In Progress for a particular team member but nothing is moving to Done. You need to figure out why.

If your workflow is more specific, you may see a work overload for the database team while nothing is In Progress for your front-end developer.

WIP limits won’t solve these problems, but they do let you know when you have a problem so you can dig in and figure out a solution.

Tips for using card colors and swimlanes

Agile project management for a Kanban team is all about keeping the team productive without getting in their way, reporting on overall status, anticipating issues, and problem-solving. Card colors and swimlanes give project managers at-a-glance insight into key team metrics.

Card colors and swimlanes represent specific issue attributes or they can represent query results or assignees. We like to think of the card colors as more detailed issue-tracking data, while swimlanes give us a higher-level picture of the whole body of work.

Regardless of how you like to organize your work, consider the flexibility with assigning queries to your swimlanes or card colors. Following are some ideas to query by:

• Type of work: UX, design, front-end, database, etc.
• Label: Create team- or project-specific labels.
• Components: Divide your project into sections and assign each section a component.
• Effort and time-tracking: Anticipate throughput by at-a-glance efforts by work item.
• Business value or reporter: Get organized by stakeholder or business unit.
• Custom fields: View user segment or another custom field that is meaningful to your company.

Kanban and Jira boards can support various project management processes, from project plan to workflow management to stakeholder communications. You just have to explore what's available and get creative with your Jira customizations.

Get organized with Jira project management tools

Regardless of your agile methodology preference, effective project organization and oversight are almost impossible without some kind of project management software. But let's be honest — the last thing your team or organization needs is another tool.

Your software developers love using Jira software. 🤟 You can configure Jira workflows and customizations to meet even the pickiest project management needs with just a little effort. You'll save time and the hassle of integrating an external product or worse - manually pulling project data together for your reporting and stakeholder communications.

The Atlassian Marketplace is a great source to find add-ons for even more functionality to handle your task management and project team needs. Easy Agile created two apps specifically to help project managers: Easy Agile TeamRhythm and Easy Agile Programs.

Easy Agile TeamRhythm helps scrum and kanban teams plan and manage their work with the context that a user story map format provides. Team retrospective functionality helps your team focus on continuous improvement.

View team swimlanes, track cross-team dependencies, and keep your focus at the program level with Epic- and Feature-only views with our Programs app.

Whether you're supporting a Kanban or Scrum team, building roadmaps, version planning, and planning program increments in Jira just got easier!

Sprints are at the core of agile principles. And they’re how a Scrum team uses a predefined time period to work together towards an agreed-upon goal. A sprint focuses on interaction and collaboration to produce working software. A team has to do a lot of work to maintain their sprint workflows in Jira. Changing task statuses, notifying teammates to sprint changes, and keeping developers’ code changes in sync with Jira tasks can all add up to a lot of manual mouse clicks. 🖱

Many of these manual steps can be automated to save your team effort.

Help your Scrum team with Jira automations

Scrum is a framework for getting agile work done. The Scrum events are:

• Sprint: The time period in which the team works toward their sprint goal (e.g., completing a set amount of user stories from the product backlog). The next sprint starts when the previous one ends.
• Sprint Planning Meeting: A meeting that scopes the amount of effort required for backlog items prioritized by the product owner. The software development team commits to completing that amount of work.
• Daily Scrum: A brief meeting each workday when Scrum team members update each other on the progress of their work within the sprint. It's a time to lend support or unblock another team member who may be stuck on an issue.
• ​Sprint Review: A time for the Scrum team and stakeholders to review the outcomes of the completed sprint and discuss what impacts they have on future sprints.
• Sprint Retrospective: A meeting to find opportunities to improve on the team's agile processes and its interactions with each other.

Which Scrum roles are involved:

• Software Developers: They get the work done but don't want any sprint surprises.
• Product Owner: This person prioritizes the work and sometimes has to make unplanned mid-sprint changes.

Every player on the software development team, from startups to established companies, has repetitive tasks they need to perform throughout its sprint events. Because we're all human, when we're sprinting, we sometimes forget to transition the status of issues or do the little things in Jira that keep everyone on the team aware of what's happening in our sprint in real-time.

Automate your sprint workflows with Jira

Have no fear. Jira can help automate typical sprint workflows like task transitions and team notifications. 🤯 Agile project management within software development is a methodology that is conducive to automation. You can link behaviors in your Jira issues to trigger actions from tools like Slack and MS Teams, email, GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab.

You can use Jira automations to do things such as:

• Notify team members and stakeholders of any changes to a sprint
• Trigger actions based on task transitions within a sprint iteration
• Keep Jira task and sub-task statuses and story points in sync
• Connect code commits and build statues to Jira issues

Oh my!

If you didn't know these tools existed, here's your chance to learn them.

Automate your way to connectivity

Keep agile teammates in the know

When a sprint begins, it's important the product owner notifies team members if something changes. That way, you can make sure it won't negatively impact your ability to complete your sprint goal.

Communication within agile teams is paramount, and Jira provides ways to automatically notify your scrum team based on rules you set about your sprint. For example, you can send emails or Slack notifications when the status of a task changes.

Task and sub-task coordination

Sub-tasks are a handy feature in Jira. They help you break tasks into smaller steps and track their progress as they're being worked on. Scrum masters encourage this universally in agile, but it can be easy for sub-tasks to get out of sync with their parent tasks. We’ll soon learn a Jira automation to prevent this.

Connect developer code work to Jira issues

Your development team has a lot on its plate during a sprint. Not only does it have to complete all of its user stories — but there's also the mechanics of keeping code commits by developers synced with their associated Jira tickets. And, always remembering to keep these in tune with Jira tickets is burdensome. As you’ll see, there are ways to connect actions taken in GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab and update Jira tickets.

Jira automations FTW

Here are our nine favorite Jira automations that streamline our sprint workflow.

1. Notify teammates when a story is added to a sprint

Scope creep (adding new points to a sprint after it starts) is nobody's friend. However, there are times when a product owner needs to pull an item from the product backlog and add it to the current sprint. When this happens, it's best practice to inform the whole team that a change has been made. Use this handy automation template to send an email to your team when backlog items are added to a sprint.

2. Automatically assign a task when its status changes

Some team members need to be made aware when an issue transitions to being on their plate. When an issue’s status switches to In Review, for example, you can auto-assign it to a QA teammate.

3. Celebrate when your sprint is over by sending a Slack message

A lot of work happens during a sprint. Because your next sprint always begins immediately when the current one ends, it's often difficult to find time to celebrate wins. Use this celebration to send a fun Slack message to your team when the final issue in the sprint is completed. You can make sprints fun with automation!

4. Automatically put In Progress issues into the current sprint

There are lots of moving parts when trying to ensure that In Progress Jira issues are visible in the current sprint. Nobody wants hidden work. When a developer moves a task into In Progress, you can automatically assign it to the current sprint.

5. Sum the story points of sub-tasks and update the value of the parent task

Be sure that your story point totals are accurate by automatically summing the points of your sub-tasks and updating the parent task with the value. They'll never be out of sync with each other with this nifty automation rule.

6. Close an issue when all of its sub-tasks are complete

Some people like to work with sub-tasks, which is great. But it's easy to overlook closing a parent task after you've finished your work and closed all of its sub-tasks. Well … you can automatically close a parent task when all of its sub-tasks are complete so this doesn't happen. 🤖

7. Move a task to In Progress when a commit is made

Save your developers time by cutting down on redundant tasks. When a code commit is made, it means a task is being worked on. Connect Jira to your commit repository (GitHub, Bitbucket, or GitLab) so that when a code commit is made, the associated Jira issue moves to In Progress.

8. Add a comment to a ticket when a pull request is made

Adding details to a Jira ticket from a pull request can be a copy-and-paste job — but it doesn't have to be. Use a trigger to add the details from the request into a Jira comment.

9. Notify the development team when a Jenkins build fails

Certain issues can't wait to be realized by the whole team on the next daily stand-up. If your Jenkins build fails, this is an awesome way to let the whole team know by Slack, MS Teams, or email ... right away.

Make agile sprints easy

Automations in Jira make a sprint team’s life easier by cutting down on the manual work needed to keep the mechanics of a sprint running.

You can use modified versions of these automations with Easy Agile to make agile even easier! For example, celebrate roadmap wins by notifying your team when issues are completed in your Easy Agile Roadmaps for Jira, or sync your Jira data fields with your roadmap. There are many ways to mix-and-match rules and triggers to make Jira automations work for you.