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.
