KANBAN Introduction

KANBAN

Kanban is another concept of managing software development. It is gaining more and more popularity nowadays. Kanban means a signboard in Japanese. Kanban is done visually using a board where one can follow the progress of development through the different phases of the project. It is said that human brain can intuit visual information 60,000 times faster than text.

Kanban allows you to have only limited amount of Items in a single phase of the Development (for example in In Progress or in Testing) and therefore it prevents the team from doing all at once. When a certain phase is full of Items also the previous phase gets blocked, because it can not push any item into the next (filled) phase of development. So the team has to focus on the bottleneck where the work is stuck first before doing anything else.

Kanaban allows the developers to take tasks to work at any time unlike Scrum where all the Product Backlog Items are being pushed into the Sprint Backlog during the Sprint Planning. In this situation the manager has less administrative work to do with planning and organizing developers times.

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Hi, my name is Vladimir and I am an IT Project Manager (Delivery manager is the role name in the company) in Levi9 www.levi9.com

I have 7 years of experience as a software developer and now I have started working in this new role about which I will be writing here.

Here I would like to write about project management topics, reviews of books and interesting situations from work.

Agile development is the most popular way of developing software nowadays and we are witnesses that more and more companies are switching to it. It is characterized by small and iterative development cycles.

Let's start by introducing you to the Manifesto of Agile Software Development and it's principles.

One of the currently most used agile frameworks are SCRUM and Kanban. There are stories that they have became obsolete and there are new ones being developed constantly. There is also one other very interesting framework called DSDM which can nicely be combined with others. For the time being I will focus on these two. Every approach has pros and cons and it is important to learn each in depth in order to know when to use which and when to replace them with a different one.