1. Introduction to Kanban
Abhilash Chandran
Xerox
Tata Elxsi – Agile Xcellenz Week

2. What are we going to discuss
today?
• What is Kanban?
• How can we apply Kanban principles to
software development

3. Kanban
• Literally means “visual card,” “signboard,” or
“billboard.”
• Used by Toyota for Lean and Just In Time
Manufacturing

4. Kanban Card

5. Why Kanban ?

6. Light
• Light process for continuous improvement
• Lot of option for innovation

7. Kanban in Software Development

8. We love
• We prefer short iterations for frequent
feedback
• More opportunities
– For measuring progress
– Inspect & Adapt

9. The problem
• Daily or hourly changes – we need shorter cycles.
• Each small function contributes to the bug
software
– Difficult to analyse the impact of small items
• People rushing to finish testing before iteration
ends
• Last minute top priority items
• Low quality
• Technical debts

10. Not a Pretty Picture
©Jeff Patton
But we see it in many Scrum Teams

11. What does Kanban enables us to
do?

12. Manage Dependencies
• A way to manage dependent events
• Limit Work In Progress ( WIP)
– Multitasking is waste – Avoid it

13. The small picture
• Visualize the change/challenges
• Visualize the workflow
• Focus on Flow not on iterations
– Optimize the flow
– Remove the impediments to flow

14. Mange Flow
© Emil Van Est

15. Push vs Pull
• Promotes Pull
• Promotes Pull system

16. Start our Journey
• Divide task into smallest units
– Why?

17. Multiple teams can work on same
Kanban Board
But in Scrum We had only one team. hmmm

18. Scrum Board

19. Kanban Board

20. Kanban Board

21. State with Ready columns

22. Discussions with teams
• Ready lane to show the upcoming work
• Prompts discussion when something is ready
to move to next stage
• Identify bottlenecks when queue builds up

23. Confusion
• How to identify the Lanes needed?
– What you need to show?
• How to find the appropriate WIP
– Usually less than the number of people in
team/teams

24. Advice
When in doubt start with Less
– Eliminates Waste
– Experiment & find what is best for you

25. WIP - Do
• Limit WIP on columns, boards
• Visually represents the bottleneck
• Force people to do work in pairs or in groups
• Can discuss what the problem is
• Innovate & find better solution with limited
capacity

26. WIP - Outcome
• Predictability
• Small batch sizes
• Small sizes promotes more in depth discussion

27. Cycle time
• Cycle time – Time taken by a card to reach the
done state
• Usually we add date/time to card when it
starts and pass through each stage
• Different types of cycle time
– End to End
– Phase/stage

28. Cumulative Flow Diagram
• Lead Time - Similar to cycle time except it is generally the time for the entire process
from commitment to customer delivery.
• Throughput - The count of work items finished in a given time period
(week, month, quarter, etc.), analogous to the Scrum metric of velocity

29. We like Kanban so we will transform
everything tomorrow
Not exactly…..

30. Baby Steps
• Start with what you do now
• Take SMALL steps
• Apply the PDCA cycle on top of Kanban

31. PDCA Cycle
• The PDCA (Plan DO Check Act) cycle was made popular by Dr. W. Edwards
Deming.

32. Borrowing from Scrum World
• Product Owner or BA prioritize the work
• Daily Kanban Meeting to discuss the flow
• Upload to production
– Daily
– Weekly
– Date
– A critical mass is accumulated
• Daily/Weekly Meeting to Review the progress –
Retrospective
– Stronger Feedback cycle helps in better outcome

33. Core Practices
1. Visualise
2. Limit WIP
3. Manage flow
4. Make policies explicit
5. Feedback loops
6. Improve collaboratively, evolve
experimentally

34. Kanban is
• Not a Project Management Methodology
• Not a Software Development Process
• is a service-oriented approach to management
& organization

35. Questions

36. Contact Me
• Email : c.abhilash@gmail.com
• Twitter : https://twitter.com/cabhilash
• Blog : http://www.TheAgileSchool.com