Kanban (development)

Kanban (Japanese: 看板, meaning signboard or billboard) is a lean method to manage and improve work across human systems.

This approach aims to manage work by balancing demands with available capacity, and by improving the handling of system-level bottlenecks.

Work items are visualized to give participants a view of progress and process, from start to finish—usually via a kanban board.

In knowledge work and in software development, the aim is to provide a visual process management system which aids decision-making about what, when, and how much to produce.

[4] Kanban boards, designed for the context in which they are used, vary considerably and may show work item types ("features" and "user stories" here), columns delineating workflow activities, explicit policies, and swimlanes (rows crossing several columns, used for grouping user stories by feature here).

Team members working on "feature acceptance" (the previous step) might get stuck because they can't deploy new epics.

In a Kanban board setup, swimlanes are used to visually organize work into different stages of a process, ensuring clarity and focus.

For efficient workflow management, it is crucial to maintain distinct swimlanes for key phases such as requirements, development, testing, and closed/completed tasks.

In 2009, Don Reinertsen published a book on second-generation lean product-development[11] which describes the adoption of the kanban system and the use of data collection and an economic model for management decision-making.

Another early contribution came from Corey Ladas, whose 2008 book Scrumban[3] suggested that kanban could improve scrum for software development.