I was keen to understand more about kanban and how it might be applied in various project scenarios. At the SPA2009 conference, there was a session presented by Karl Scotland on his take on kanban (Kanban, Flow and Cadence) together with a very interactive BoF session on Lean and Kanban. Whilst the comparison of lean, based on a model, originally promoted by Toyota, of optimising production, against kanban, which limits the work in progress was a simple and very understandable comparison of the two approaches, it was when the debate moved to seeing how both lean and kanban could be applied to software developments that the debate got really interesting.
Clearly software developments come in all shapes and sizes and the audience clearly represented a good cross section of developments and associated practices. Both approaches are clearly well suited to an agile approach in which features are developed to provide a flow of (increasing) value to the end user. This works particularly well in an iterative development where frequent delivery is encouraged, especially where the features are being evolved based on user feedback. This also requires a tolerant customer who can accommodate some failures. An interesting statement of 'get it right second time' was promoted as acceptable provided you learn from mistakes. I find that hard to accept as the 'norm' because it is completely ignoring any recognition of embedding quality in a delivered product. It might be acceptable in a prototype development but not in a production environment. Clearly there was something missing. There was! The integration step. Now I consider integration to be a very important (and potentially very expensive) stage, which is often squeezed in terms of time (how do you know you have finished?), and can't be omitted.
So could kanban work in a more traditional waterfall development approach? Maybe. In a traditional approach, the requirements are analysed before design, implementation and testing are performed. Using a kanban system, a flow of features could be pushed through the separate stages of design, implementation and testing before handing over to integration, with limits being imposed at each stage. This would probably require that the 3 life cycle stages are performed by different team members, a not unreasonable expectation in a traditional development. Provided the requirements are relatively stable and the ordering and independence of features is organised to support a sensible integration approach in order to deliver increasing value (or functionality) then this could be an interesting approach. Managing the queues at each stage of the life cycle needs to be carefully managed since the costs of managing each queue must be proportional to the size of the queue otherwise the process becomes very inefficient.
Now for the challenge. How likely is it that each feature will be take approximately the same time through the life cycle? - probably not. In my experience, it is highly unlikely that each requirement (or feature) will be equivalent in terms of effort expended, particularly when the software forms part of a complex system. This will result in some initial inefficiency as it would take some time for the queues to become populated with tasks. There is the temptation to process easy requirements first as a way of seeding the work queues quickly. However, from a project management perspective this is probably not what is required as it leaves the difficult tasks (and hence risks) to the end (and most difficult tasks will probably impinge on the easier tasks in some form resulting in some additional unplanned work).
Looking back at the David Anderson presentation, it is clear why a kanban approach worked well in one of the case studies since the approach was only applied to bug fixing rather than in a new development. I believe that looking at kanban in a multiple life cycle development needs a different approach for development with the queues being placed at different points in the system life cycle (as distinct from the software life cycle) to avoid bottlenecks building up. I would advocate that the same developer should be responsible for design, implementation and testing of each feature so that the queue limits are placed on the exit from analysis (or requirements definition) and entry into integration rather than within the different stages of software development. In a lean or agile development this approach is normal since the developers are performing all stages of the life cycle; in waterfall developments, and particularly large systems, this is not the norm.
Adopting kanban in waterfall certainly isn't new (see Kenji Hiranbe's article) but there is little evidence currently to demonstrate if it can deliver tangible benefits for all types of project approaches. Are there any case studies to prove or disprove my hypothesis?
