I much prefer Kanban to Scrum. It gets straight to the point which is "what is the next most important thing to do", and let's management/stakeholders worry about what's next while engineers focus on the current top of their heap.
Where Scrum wiggles its way into relevance is schedule. Most businesses need to be able to commit to some deadline with customers or coordinating teams, and scrum lets managers convince themselves that they can project 3-6 months of work into sprints.
The reality of course is that the requirements and deadlines are constantly moving and never match what was predicted, but you need _some_ prediction to coordinate large projects. So scrum just ends up being a hack to generate time pressure on the component tasks.
What's the right solution? So far in my life it comes down to Kanban and focus for engineers, plus an experienced leader that can guess reasonably well, pad for uncertainty, and renegotiate requirements to make that guess come true.
Where Scrum wiggles its way into relevance is schedule. Most businesses need to be able to commit to some deadline with customers or coordinating teams, and scrum lets managers convince themselves that they can project 3-6 months of work into sprints.
The reality of course is that the requirements and deadlines are constantly moving and never match what was predicted, but you need _some_ prediction to coordinate large projects. So scrum just ends up being a hack to generate time pressure on the component tasks.
What's the right solution? So far in my life it comes down to Kanban and focus for engineers, plus an experienced leader that can guess reasonably well, pad for uncertainty, and renegotiate requirements to make that guess come true.