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Kanban - An Introduction By:Namrata Parik

Scrum addresses the software development where the requirements are frozen before the sprint starts, but what about the teams which work on dynamic requirements which can come at any time?
For example in a team which works on technical tickets, these tickets may come at anytime and hence the sprint cannot be decided, estimation cannot be done and the velocity cannot be calculated.
Kanban is the solution to all this. Started in Toyota, Japan this was introduced to increase the productivity of the factory.
‘KANBAN’ in Japenese, means a visual signal.
Kanban was later used as an effective method in agile software development and it can be implemented in teams where requirements are not certain. The work items in this approach, are put on a board where each team members can access and update their work.
The team can have a physical or virtual Kanban board. Colocated teams prefer to have a physical board. The basic function of the Kanban board is that the team can visualize their task and discuss and solve any impediments they see immediately. A basic Kanban board has a three-step workflow: To Do, In Progress, and Done. However this might be changed depending upon the business needs and team requirements.

Image courtesy:brodzinski.com
This approach requires transparency of work and communication of capacity, therefore it gives the accurate picture of team’s performance.
All the information about that particular work item of the team is written on the Kanban card, which gives the entire team a clear picture about who is responsible for a particular work item, what work has to be done and how much time is that work item going to take. A kanban team is only focused on the work that's actively in progress. The Product owner has the task of updating the backlog actively and the team members after completing their task can take the next task from the backlog.
Hence, here it becomes very important that the backlog is actively groomed so that the task with the highest priority are on the top. Since the tasks with highest priority are always delivered the development team can be assured that they are delivering maximum value to the business.
Therefore the need for fixed length sprint is eliminated, task prioritization is done on the go and task estimation has to be done immediately after as task comes in.
A few other features of Kanban approach,
  1. The team is cross functional which means that the task of testing a work item is not blocked due to the non availability of testing team, the developers are also equipped to do the testing if the need arises.
  2. Multitasking is eliminated, this is not to be confused with cross functional team. Multitasking leads to reduced performance if a developer has lot of tasks ‘in progress’ then while trying to complete all of them, none of them will be fixed completed leading to no business value. This can be addressed by limiting the number of tasks in ‘in Progress’ category to a macimum of two tasks, for example.
  3. Charts – Various charts are available to measure the team metrics.

    Image courtesy: kanbantool.com
There are control charts to see the cycle average for each issue
There are also charts to indicate what task is in what state – to do, in progress or completed.

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