Presentation: A Kanban System for Software Engineering

by Amr Elssamadisy on Mar 30, 2009 | NOTICE: The next QCon is in New York Jun 10-14, Join us!

Ideas from Lean Thinking have been growing in popularity with the Agile software development community. Over the past year, the use of kanban (literally signal cards) popular in manufacturing has been seen as the significant innovation in managing agile work and is growing in adoption at firms such as Yahoo!

David Anderson introduced the first electronic kanban system at Microsoft in 2004 and has since extended the technique through his work at Corbis. Kanban acts to limit work-in-progress and focus the team on achieving a continuous flow of value to the customer. Kanban innovates on accepted agile management practice by providing an iteration-less process with a regular release cadence.

It helps achieve a balance of demand against capacity on the team and eliminate multi-tasking. David will present a brief history of the technique through case study reports from teams at Microsoft and Corbis. The kanban system enables David to deliver on his Recipe for Success: focus on quality; reduce work-in-progress; balance demand against throughput; and prioritize.

You can watch David's presentation at QCon 2008 as he discusses how kanban can be used effectively in software development.

Related Editorial

Infographic: Just How Big is the Nerd Economy

Five Key Practices to Agile ALM

Enterprise-class API Patterns for Cloud & Mobile

Agile Maturity Model Applied to Building and Releasing Software

Agile workshops and training

Related Sponsor

Agile Project Management That Adapts With You. Provide your global development team a shared space that adapts to the way they work.

Hello stranger!

You need to Register an InfoQ account or to post comments. But there's so much more behind being registered.

Get the most out of the InfoQ experience.

Tell us what you think

Community comments

Currupted video?! by Peter Kerschbaumer Posted

Re: Currupted video?! by Floyd Marinescu Posted

PPT by Aloy Mendoza Posted

Outstanding presentation, especially for Kanban newbies by Rob Kraft Posted

The website about Kanban systems for software engineering by Justyna Laskowska Posted

Currupted video?! by Peter Kerschbaumer

The video stopped at around 50 minutes.

Re: Currupted video?! by Floyd Marinescu

Hi Peter, for me it runs fine. Try moving the time slider to just after 50 minutes so you can continue watching it.

Floyd

PPT by Aloy Mendoza

Can we get Power Point Slide copies also? Some of the slides overlap due to animation i think.

Outstanding presentation, especially for Kanban newbies by Rob Kraft

We are attempting to adopt a Kanban/lean approach instead of having iterations of fixed length. This presentation is full of gems, jewels, and ideas that we can try and use to make our processes better. Thanks to David and to InfoQ for making this available!

The website about Kanban systems for software engineering by Justyna Laskowska

I suggest exploring an extensive collection of articles at www.kanbanlibrary.com/ - Kanban Library/DevOps Kanban.