Quick Intro to Kanban followed by a demo SOFT8022 Quick Intro to Kanban followed by a demo

Kanban Not simply an alternative to Scrum; can have Scrum and Kanban together Has its roots in lean manufacturing and pull mechanisms – i.e. determine what needs to be done based on demand rather than “pushing” by forecasting demand Facilitates JIT – Just-In-Time manufacturing process (c) Larkin Cunningham

Kanban Method Has been applied to software development Emphasis again is on just-in-time delivery Workflow is managed to avoid overloading team members The kanban method was developed by David Anderson (c) Larkin Cunningham

Kanban Method A board is used to visualise the flow of units of work or issues Idea is to limit work-in-progress by having limits on the number of issues that can be worked on in any stage of the workflow, e.g. going from product backlog / requirements through development, user acceptance testing, deployment, etc. This helps to identify bottlenecks, considered a major advantage of Kanban (c) Larkin Cunningham

Kanban Method Hold a daily standup meeting in front of the board, similar to a daily scrum where all stakeholders attend (c) Larkin Cunningham

Kanban Board Example of using a whiteboard to maintain a Kanban board (c) Larkin Cunningham

Kanban Board Can pin cards or stick post-it notes onto the board to represent issues Cards could represent change requests and issues can then be stuck to the cards by pinning an issue card to a change request card or sticking an issue post-it note on top of a change request post-it note Or… (c) Larkin Cunningham

Kanban Board Can use an electronic kanban board… Note the highlighted limits Note the colour coding , e.g. red indicating blocking issue, Green for low priority Swimlanes can categorise issues / change requests “Expedite” is a special lane that ignores other limits and priorities – allows for a “silver bullet” (c) Larkin Cunningham

Kanban Method – Andersons’s 6 Practices Visualise the flow of work so that understanding of the processes and how work progresses can be seen at a glance (e.g. the Kanban Board) Limit Work-in-progress so that work is “pulled” into each part of the workflow when capacity is available (according to the imposed limits) – this helps identify the constraints in the workflow system, or bottlenecks (c) Larkin Cunningham

Kanban Method Practices Manage Flow by monitoring, measuring and reporting. Allows for continuous improvement to be monitored to ensure positive changes rather than negative. Make policies explicit so that workers / team members understand the processes well enough to be able to discuss them, debate them, suggest improvements for them. (c) Larkin Cunningham

Kanban Method Practices Implement Feedback Loops by reviewing the flow of work versus the capacity to carry out the work using metrics, indicators and also by having regular review meetings (daily standup meetings, similar to daily scrums) that reflect back on the processes. In particular, there is the “operations review” which looks at things from an organisational rather than team level (c) Larkin Cunningham

Kanban Method Practices David Anderson later came up with the 6th of what were originally 5 practices: improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally. Teams should have a shared understanding of the theories underlying the processes (not just blindly accepting). Thereby, the process of continuously improving the process can be more scientific. (c) Larkin Cunningham

Non-iterative? There is no mention of Sprints or short development cycles in Kanban “Cadence” is not cyclical No estimation – work can only be done as fast as capacity allows Can still have regular releases, so can still facilitate CI, Continuous Delivery, DevOps, etc (c) Larkin Cunningham

JIRA Agile A brief demo now of Kanban in JIRA Agile… (c) Larkin Cunningham