Kanban Approach In a Nutshell

Lean Approach to Agile Development

The Kanban Approach to software development aims to manage work by balancing the demands with available capacity, and improving the handling of system level bottlenecks.  Further goals of the Kanban Aproach are to distribute tasks among a development team to eliminate inefficiency in task assignment as much as possible.

Kanban is a management framework that has six general practices:

• Visualization of tasks

• Controlling work in progress

• Flow management

• Making policies explicit

• Using feedback loops

• Collaboration

A Kanban Approach is a unique method for performing adaptive and preventive maintenance with an emphasis on continual delivery while not overburdening a development team. The focus of the Kanban Approach is on breaking up and visualizing small pieces of work and limiting the amount of tasks being worked at a particular time, and distributing work load among team members.  Additionally, a Kanban Approach is well suited for work where there is no big backlog of features to go through. Rather, the focus is on quickly working through small tasks as the tasks are identified.

The primary tool of a Kanban Approach is the Kanban Board which visually depict units of work or tasks at various stages of a process  Units of work or task moved from left to right to show progress and to help coordinate teams performing the work. Kanban Boards are typically divided into horizontal “swimlanes” representing the stages of work including bit not limited to Backlog, To Do, In Progress, Testing, and Done.

A Kanban Board shows how work moves from left to right, each column represents a stage within the value stream. Kanban boards can span many teams, and even whole departments or organizations. The Kanban board is also ideal for managing units of work and tasks for operations and maintenance purposes.