Kanban pull and flow - a transparent workflow for improved quality and productivity in software development

Abstract

In software industry, there has been a significant focus shift from sequential waterfall model to iterative agile/scrum methods to continuous lean software development in the last several years. Traditional waterfall model is the dominant project management paradigm, agile methodology is direct response to waterfall model, and lean is recent one. In practice, when software companies make an attempt to adopt agile/scrum methods, the team is unwilling to alter their way of doing the day-to-day work. The mismatch between the processes makes the team very difficult to accept the new approach and ultimately regress to their former process - waterfall model. On the other hand, flow-based Kanban offers an opportunity to build on what is already working well and gradually makes the transformation to better process. Kanban is based on lean principles. There have been a lot of attempts for making Kanban suitable for software development process.