What Is Kanban?

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Kanban is Japanese for “visual sign” or “card.” It is a visual framework used to implement Agile that shows what to produce, when to produce it, and how much to produce. It encourages small, incremental changes to your current system and does not require a certain set up or procedure (meaning, you could overlay Kanban on top of other existing workflows).

Kanban was inspired by the Toyota Production System and Lean Manufacturing. In the 1940s, Toyota improved its engineering process by modeling it after how supermarkets stock shelves. Engineer Taiichi Ohno noticed that supermarkets stock just enough product to meet demand, optimizing the flow between the supermarket and customer. Inventory would only be restocked when there was empty space on the shelf (a visual cue). And because inventory matched consumption, the supermarket improved efficiency in inventory management.

Toyota brought these same principles to its factory floors. Different teams would create a card (or Kanban) to communicate that they had extra capacity and were ready to pull more materials. Because all requests for parts were pulled from the order, Kanban is sometimes called the “pull system.”

These same ideas apply to software teams and IT projects today. In this context, development work-in-progress (WIP) takes the place of inventory, and new work can only be added when there is an “empty space” on the team’s visual Kanban board. Kanban matches the amount of WIP to the team’s capacity, improving flexibility, transparency, and output.

According to the Kanban blog, “Kanban is a technique for managing a software development process in a highly efficient way. Kanban underpins Toyota's ‘just-in-time’ (JIT) product system. Although producing software is a creative activity and therefore different to mass-producing cars, the underlying mechanism for managing the production line can still be applied.”

When looking at Kanban vs Agile, it’s important to remember that Kanban is one flavor of Agile. It’s one of many frameworks used to implement Agile software development.