Kanban is probably the simplest commonly used approach to software development and project management. With such a simple tool, which in terms of required practices prescribes close to nothing, we don't expect much change of the way we work. After all we are advised to start without changing our process much when introducing Kanban. The interesting thing which is observed in Kanban teams in the long is something which is called emergent behavior - best practices which are seamlessly introduced without much conscious effort. What more it's pretty common that exactly the same practices were resisted when introduced by direct management action before. The session shows how Kanban, as an alternative to top-down approaches, can be used to support introduction of best engineering and organizational practices using a few real-life examples.

1. Kanban
Improvements when you don’t
look for them
Pawel Brodzinski
blog.brodzinski.com
vsoft.pl
@pawelbrodzinski

2. Kanban in a pill

3. Kanban improvements – emergent
behavior
No prescription how to organize team or project
Big help with unveiling bottlenecks
Incentives to improve the flow of work
With Kanban you don’t plan specific
improvements – they just emerge

4. Areas of improvements
Process
optimizations
The way team
works
Engineering
practices

5. Example: optimized handoffs

6. Following feature’s lifecycle
time

7. Optimization in handoff stages

8. Example: ad-hoc swarming

9. Typical problem solving approach

10. Natural (on-demand) swarming

11. Example: collective code ownership

12. Bus factor = 1?

13. Choosing tasks

14. Final food for thought
These were only a few of possible examples
Don’t buy that uncritically
Your team is unique
With proper approach improvements will come

15. Kanban is like a box of chocolates…

16. Thank you
Pawel Brodzinski
blog.brodzinski.com
vsoft.pl
@pawelbrodzinski