What fascinates me the most in the Lean software development approach is the quality of the people that support it. Mary and Tom Poppendieck are not an exception to this rule. Their book “Leading Lean Software Development” achieves the seemingly contradictory goals of being very insightful but still easy and captivating to read.
In the context of software development, Kanban is an approach based on Lean that tries to limit waste and work in progress to the actual capacity of the software development team. The aim of Kanban is to create a context that balances capacity and demand through a value stream and promote visual project management.
The definitive talk on Work in Progress (WIP) talks about getting things done. From team-level to whole-enterprise scale, the amount of work inside the system directly affects the amount of value being delivered.
Which is better, Agile or Kanban? Actually, the answer is not quite that simple. Agile development and Lean, where Kanban comes from, are both related approaches to software development. Agile project management guides us to work in chunks, called Scrum Sprints or Iterations, Kanban also aims to work in smaller steps.
Redmine is a popular open source project management web application written using the Ruby on Rails framework. This software is more oriented towards a traditional approach for project management with Gantt charts and calendar than Agile, Scrum or Kanban. However, the Redmine architecture allows however creating plugins to add additional features. The development of a number of Agile, Scrum, Kanban and Lean plugins has therefore been started in these past years.
There are still many open source kanban tools available, contrary to open source projects for Scrum tools that have mostly ended being transformed in a limited offer that supports a main commercial product. The simplicity of the Kanban approach has allowed open source software developers to create and maintain Kanban tools based on various platforms.
At the beginning of his book “Kanban for Skeptics”, Nick Oostvogels writes “By listing the 5 most common arguments against Kanban and my response to them, I hope to help people in their Kanban journey and build great organizations that create amazing products.”
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