Agile software development with Kanban

A lot of people in Agile circles are talking about David Anderson’s Kanban software development technique. To be honest I’ve looked at some of David’s online material and I haven’t really seen anything that new. But then, I’ve never spoken to David or seen any of his presentations.

So I took the opportunity at SPA to ask Steve Freeman about it. Unlike me, Steve has spoken to David so here are some of the points I got:
• Kanban teams have given up on planning and estimating entirely. The activities took more time than they were worth. Prioritisation is - as far as possible - handed back to the business. The highest priority is simply done.
• Kanban teams have a number of ‘slots’ by which I think they mean ‘tasks they can be working on at one time’. The business decided what to put through these slots.
• Teams track how long it takes for a piece of work to move through the system. I guess they just note the start date and end date. They can then tell what their throughput is which replaces the need to estimate.
• Work is tracked by cards on a board. This visibility together with the flow measurement helps show where the bottlenecks are.
• The business may (i.e. not all teams do this) offer the business a ‘Silver Bullet’. The business can use this to cheat: to fast track a feature through the system, to do a feature without any of the usual pre-work, or such. However, the business is only allowed one Silver Bullet at a time.

It all sounds very interesting and I hope to hear more. And if anyone reading this knows any more - or thinks I’ve got something wrong - then please add your comment.

According to Steve, David is finding that his bottleneck is not development. The bottleneck is earlier, its with the business deciding what to do and what needs to doing. This is something I have observed myself. In fact I thought I had written a blog entry on this subject, perhaps with the title ‘The Bottleneck has moved’ but I can’t find it so probably I haven’t written it just thought about it.

Anyway, I’ll say it now: The Bottleneck has moved.

In my own experiences with my Blue-White-Red agile method, I found that while it took time for developers to do work this was simply leg-work. More developers more work. Quality improvements (unit testing, code reviews, etc) helped and these made the teams more productive. But when ever the developers needed to consult the business (i.e. product management) things slowed down. Or, developers took the wrong decision and re-work resulted.

And if we want to practice Lean development then we can’t waste time building the wrong thing. We need the business to support us.

Over the last 20-30 years developers have got a host of new toys to make them more productive: their own (fast) machines, more productive languages, nice IDEs like Eclipse, and so on. Surely some of this technology has boosted their performance. On the other hand, the pipe coming into development hasn’t go any bigger. If anything it has got smaller.

What strikes me about Kanban is that it requires more business buy in, more business acceptance of the method and requires the business to know more about its role and what it wants. This is good because it makes development more responsive to the business.

This is entirely what I would expect because, while Agile/Lean can improve development alone, it ultimately needs to exist in an Agile/Lean environment. If it does not there will be tension, eventually the organization will kill its Agile development or Agile development will infect the wider company. This might be what David is seeing (or creating!) with Kanban.