» Kanban and Lean Software Development » Managed Chaos by Naresh Jain

Kanban and Lean Software Development

Kanban seems to be a good starting point to adopt Lean thinking on a team. Of course Kanban alone is not sufficient to become lean. You need to Trust & Respect team members and you need concepts like Single Minute setup, Mistake-proofing, Zero Inspection, Kaizen, etc. Kanban to me is a great manifestation of Queuing Theory and to some extent Theory of Constraints.

Jeff Patton wrote a great intro to Kanban.

Of late I’m hearing a lot about Kanban and its application to software development. IMHO Kanban is nothing new. If you look at a lot of “traditional” maintenance and support teams they’ve been using Kanban for ages.

Back in 2004 when I was leading an offshore maintenance project without knowing anything about Lean or kanban, we really evolved to using a pull-system (Kanban) on our team. That was the only logically way we could work. Of course we started off with Iterations and Releases and so on. But we quickly implemented a simplified Kanban on our team.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at 9:32 AM and is filed under Agile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Tarun Gugnani

Kanban is surely a first logical step towards lean software development but for sure its not end point. Many companies fail to adopt lean basically for the reason that they concentrate more on the first logical step ( pull ) and fail to address other principles like zero defect, flow and takt. Basically being at right place with right product with right quality with right quantity at right time is essential for success Kanban to start with only addresses right quantity and one needs to look at other pillars for success as well
Tarun Gugnani

Kanban is surely a first logical step towards lean software development but for sure its not end point. Many companies fail to adopt lean basically for the reason that they concentrate more on the first logical step ( pull ) and fail to address other principles like zero defect, flow and takt. Basically being at right place with right product with right quality with right quantity at right time is essential for success Kanban to start with only addresses right quantity and one needs to look at other pillars for success as well
kinderis

It is really shame that I do not know Kanban… I work in the software development company for the several months but I have read about it for the first time. Maybe that I am a beginner there yet. It was really interesting to read your article and to know something new. Thanks a lot for this information and I will be waiting for other interesting information from you!

Sincerely,

Matt Vaterson from telecom software development