Going With the Flow

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Going With the Flow
Bob Tarne (December 3, 2009)

As agile project management gains popularity, other progressive techniques are finding their way into project managers' toolkits. One is Kanban, a “continuous-flow” approach to handling requirements, based on Lean Six Sigma concepts. Here’s a look at how Kaban can beneft software project teams and improve results.

In the world of manufacturing, the term Lean describes a set of practices originally developed by Toyota as part of the Toyota Production System. In Lean, a key focus is to remove waste. One type of waste in the production environment is work in progress (WIP) — such as having large parts inventories. Just-in-time parts flow eliminates the need for keeping WIP inventories.

In the world of software development, WIP inventories are created throughout the development lifecycle. Examples include creating a large requirements document before development starts, or writing more code than the QA team can test right away. By lean standards, a waste exists any time a component of a project is waiting for the next group in the process to work on it.

This is where Kanban comes in.

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