Most teams that say they use Kanban have a board. Columns for To Do, In Progress, Review and Done, cards moving left to right, maybe a swimlane for urgent work. What most of them don’t have is a work in progress limit on any column. Without one, the board is a status display. It shows the work. It doesn’t change how the work flows. A WIP limit is a cap on how many items can sit in a column at once.

The debate over whether a team should use kanban or scrum is often a proxy for a different and more useful question: does this team’s work arrive in predictable batches or as a continuous flow? Scrum is designed for the former. Kanban is designed for the latter. The choice follows from the nature of the work, not from a preference for ceremonies or a dislike of story points. Scrum works well when a team can define discrete deliverables, plan a fixed amount of work for a fixed period, and evaluate progress at the end of an iteration.