Starting with Kanban
Whilst there is no Kanban process as such, there is a lot of great advice around. I have gleaned the following from various sources and have found the following useful when describing to others.
The basic principles of Kanban for software development are…
- Agree a team capacity
- Limit Work in Progress (WiP) to that capacity
- Pull value through (with WiP limit)
- Make it visible (Visual Control)
- Track
- Limit input queue (Kanban Backlog)
- Increase throughput
- Quality is embedded in the process (not inspected in)
- The team continuously monitors the above to improve
So while Kanban does ask for a behavioral change initially the change requested is
(a) use a transparent method for viewing work and organizing the team
(b) limit WIP and pull work when the team has capacity.
Kanban says, start with what you do now, modify it slightly to implement pull and provide a transparent mechanism for self-organization, then evolve from there by recognizing bottlenecks, waste and variability that affect performance. As a result, every Kanban implementation will be different. Kanban will support the team’s journey of process improvement and will help expose the best solution.
