1. Kanban Intro

2. Introductions
● Hosts: microsoft.lv & agile-latvia.org
● Speaker: Aleksejs Truhans
– Programmer, systems administrator, analyst, project
manager, team leader, software engineering teacher
– Now at Citadele bank, tsi.lv, nh.lv, javaguru.lv, agile-
latvia.org and LDN.lv
– Approaching BDD
– Aleksejs.Truhans@gmail.com
● Should you have a question – raise your hand!

3. Origins
● Toyota Production System & Lean
● Value
● Value stream map
● Waste
● Flow
– highlight problems
● Further reading
– “The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement” by
Eliyahu M. Goldratt & Jeff Cox
– “Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are
not the Point” by Mary & Tom Poppendiecks

4. Kanban
● A “visual card”
● Software engineering: “Kanban” by David
Anderson
● Pull the work. Limit the capacity.
– WIP – Work In Progress
● Visualization of the flow stimulates
improvement and provokes change
– … even of ”waterfall” teams ;)
● Kanban board cartoon:
– http://blog.crisp.se/henrikkniberg/2009/06/26/1246
053060000.html

5. Pros and Cons
● Evolution rather than revolution
● Agnostic to software engineering and management
practices
● When 1 week iteration is too long
● Cadence taking form of average lead time
● There are “idle” people
● Identifies micro-level problems
● Protecting people

6. Pros and Cons
● Just giving names and structure to common sense
ideas
● May give no advantage, e.g., compared to
timeboxing
● Main effect may come from just-in-time planning
and estimating
● More suitable for unpredictable loads
● Not a complete sofware lifecycle tool

7. Reality
Dev 1 Dev n QA 1 QA n Operations
Projects
Maintenance &
Support
On hold
● Daily delivery “trains”
● Same team doing development and maintenance
● Experienced and reliable people
● Hold - if a much higher priority task comes in
● No visualisation on a common board
● Improving just-in-time'ness of prioritisation