Just like the Scrum framework, Kanban is one of the possible ways of the Agile methodology implementation. Kanban was created on the basis of Toyota Production System, and one of its primary goals is to follow the principles of Lean manufacturing. These
Just like the Scrum framework, Kanban is one of the possible ways of the Agile methodology implementation. Kanban was created on the basis of Toyota Production System, and one of its primary goals is to follow the principles of Lean manufacturing. These principles can be described as a tendency to costs elimination through minimization of the overall amount of work that is currently running (Work In Progress or WIP). The lean manufacturing principles are widely used at the manufacturing enterprises. Such an approach prevents the total amount of unused materials from growing. Moreover, this methodology allows finding the bottlenecks of the manufacturing life cycle.
But, besides industrial manufacturing, Kanban principles can be used to manage the process of almost any type. For example, it can improve the waterfall software development life cycle model. To understand how you can use Kanban for that purpose, let’s take a look at its core principles.
The Three Principles of Kanban Development
Three core principles allow you to use Kanban in your project:
- Visualize the workflow. The visual representation of development process helps determine the current status of your tasks. It’s pretty useful when you work on a big project with dozens of them.
- Limit WIP. If you restrict the number of active tasks for every phase of your project, you’ll get an ability to control the available resources and avoid the possible idleness.
- Continuous measure and improvement of the life cycle. The possibility to make changes during the working process is a distinctive feature of the Agile methodology.
How to Use Kanban?
Since Kanban can be used in many different areas, it can be implemented in various ways. But the overall process stays the same from project to project.
1. Divide the Development Process
According to the particular task, different development stages can be determined. The primary requirement is to divide the project into three big parts: “To Do”, “In Progress” and “Done”. Here’s an example of how the software development process can be divided:
- Product backlog
After you divide the whole development process into stages, you should define the number of tasks to work on at every stage. And this is what we have discussed earlier: Limiting WIP. There’s no clear solution that allows you to determine the proper number of tasks for the particular project. The optimal number depends on the situation. You can choose this number randomly at the beginning.
For example, you think that every developer should have a single task to work on. As an alternative, two developers can work on one task at the same time which will help them to interact and generate new ideas during work. The overall number of tasks for every phase can be changed after you get the first results of such a strategy. The main thing that you should remember at this stage is not to set a high number of tasks.
When you are done with dividing the development process, you can create a Kanban board.
2. Creating the Kanban Board
What is Kanban methodology? “Kanban” is a word of Japanese origin. It consists of two words: “Kan” – visible; and “Ban” – board.
The Kanban board is an intuitive way of your project representation that allows tracking the current status. During this phase, every task gets its priority level. You can create your Kanban board using Trello.
Kanban Board Example
As you can see, every task has its card. In this case, the board was divided into four parts:
- ToDo section contains tasks that were received from the customer and required to be analyzed. Each task is marked with color according to its priority.
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