DevOps Kanban - Basics

Jesper Boeg’s book is a 10 step guide on how to start using Lean and Kanban principles to optimize value and flow in a system. Jesper recommends Kanban to teams that experience following workflow problems: struggling to get Agile, doing it with not much or no success, needing to make your process more flexible and in a gradual way.

Adoption of Agile and Lean principles in web and software development is constantly increasing and experiences tremendous success. There are lot of articles, conferences, case studies and other types of information on how to apply Lean processes in software development. But there is hardly any information for sysadmins and system & operations teams. Here it is!

Kanban presents an innovative approach to project management in software development. Nowadays, when building a software the specification changes more often than ever, because companies operate in extremely unstable environment. That’s why project management should be more flexible and easily adapt to changes. Traditional approaches like eXtreme Programming (XP) lack this flexibility.

Kanban in software development is quite easy to implement but a bit more difficult to maintain. It is because there are always problems and bottlenecks appearing that do not allow the work to flow smoothly. Moreover, some developers can work faster than testers and it is typical for a bottleneck to form.
This article explains in detail how Kanban immediately reveals the pesky bottlenecks, allowing a project manager to solve them before they become a real issue.

How to implement Kanban into a software development environment? Learn the core concepts of Kanban and how to implement it into an existing system. No matter if you are currently using Scrum, RUP, XP or Waterfall, all you need to do is to follow four basic steps: define and visualize your process, limit work in progress (WIP), pull not push, monitor and improve.