InfoQ: Kanban Applied to Software Development: from Agile to Lean

22nd March 2010 16:13:56 by Richard Bennett

http://www.infoq.com/articles/hiranabe-lean-agile-kanban

"Here, a Kanban system is used in a traditional waterfall development model but with a flow. This project has separate and serial processes which they call "design", "development", "validation" etc., and the Kanban cards move between processes. Each card represents a requirement for change or addition to the system and is a handoff to the downstream process. Note that this is not a classic waterfall process, where all the requirements are "designed" at one time, "developed", and "validated" at another time, which would cause all the cards to move in a group. Instead, the cards move one by one, like the one-piece-flow of manufacturing. What's happening here is a stable "sustaining" phase in a product‘s lifecycle, managed in a waterfall state transition model with a flow. Here, you can clearly see the "flow of work" concept instead, different from the "iteration" concept of Agile. It looks more like Kanban in factories than Agile Kanban does and it can be a pull system by making a rule to allow only the downstream process to move the cards ⁸. I call this "Sustaining Kanban", and find it similar to David Anderson's "Kanban System for Sustaining Engineering", which I discuss in the later section."