Question

What kind of software development (projects) can kanban be used for and what are the requirements to implement it? I was reading a lot about kanban and how great it is. But now i have to write a paper about it that focuses of the requirements for kanban, and especially for what kind of projects kanban doesen’t fit. I couldn’t figure it out yet.

Answer 1

KarlM gave a good overview.

I think Kanban can be used in any project, because it takes your existing process and visualizes it, introduces WIP (multitasking) limits, and uses pull to maximize flow and minimize lead time. My team recently migrated to Scrum and it’s been a very smooth transition so far.

Kanban is especially good for situations in which a standard iteration doesn’t make sense.

For example, you might not have frequent releases. Maybe you want to decouple one or more of your planning, demo, retrospective, or release schedules.

Good examples:

• Maintenance project. Even though you might want to have 2-week (or whatever) meetings to discuss priority, retrospectives, etc., you’re probably not going to demo or release every 2 weeks, and it’s not likely you’ll be able to commit to everything in the next 2 weeks anyway. Situations like this are so dynamic that the priorities shift every day, as new feedback comes from customers. Scrum or other iterative processes don’t make sense in this case.
• There is a real need for stories that are longer than your iteration length. Kanban, like Scrum, thrives with small stories (better flow, slack, etc.), BUT, unlike Scrum, it DOES at least allow large stories if really necessary.
• Extremely fast-paced development. Continuous deployment. Iterations no longer make sense, because maybe you’re responding to change lighting-quick, and maybe releasing multiple times a day!

See code.flickr.com:

Flickr was last deployed 4 hours ago, including 8 changes by 2 people.
In the last week there were 85 deploys of 588 changes by 19 people.

Do you think Flickr is doing 2-week iterations, or even 1-day iterations? I doubt it. Looks like they’re in super-speed dynamic flow mode… Maybe Kanban, but definitely looks like they’re in the Lean umbrella. (Kanban falls under the umbrella of Lean thinking, and continuous deployment was made popular by last year’s book by Eric Ries, “The Lean Startup”.)

It might not fit in the following environments:

• Organizational culture can’t get away from up-front planning, overwork/commitment, push instead of pull, fixing all of schedule, scope, and cost, etc. Kanban will start to provoke continuous improvement in an organization, and many are simply opposed to anything but the traditional overengineering, overdocumented, siloed, non-Lean, non-Agile approach that they know and love, which is waterfall. Some government contracts might also fall under this category, although I believe at least DoD is trying to advance Agile in its projects now. But some companies, if you tell them they need to do LESS (i.e., limit work in progress, have a clearer vision, get less stuff done faster, but therefore more stuff done overall), will have a heart attack. Many (most?) companies are addicted to overwork, and think SLACK (which is a fundamental Lean principle) is a 4-letter word. Unfortunately, queuing theory and theory of constraints is hard to get through some people’s heads. 🙂 So Kanban might not fit in those kinds of places. 😉