Software development is notoriously difficult to schedule and manage. It requires a mixture of engineering and artistic ability that has long defied all efforts to pin down how long a given task should take, or to organize groups in a way that will allow major products to be consistently prepared on time. With Kanban Software Development, however, companies are finding that they have more control over the process and a greater ability to track what is happening than ever before.
The essential principle is that it is important to track every piece of work as it is moving through the development process. A code segment that begins in the planning process, goes through design, is actually converted into code, tested, and then released is marked on a board alongside others every step of the way. At a basic level, the idea is to know how much work is happening at each stage of the process and how it is moving along over time. This permits a team to have much better insight into what is happening and where bottlenecks may be developing, so that time and resources can be allocated and reallocated over time in a way that keeps everything moving along smoothly.
Much of the value of this approach comes from the fact that it prevents a large amount of work from piling up in a single stage of the process. If there is an issue in either development or testing that causes that portion of the team to fall behind schedule, a backlog will naturally tend to develop. Unless someone is proactively keeping track and making sure that work is balanced and continues moving evenly, there is a high probability that either tasks will get hung up in the system or people working on the stage with the backlog will cut corners on quality in an effort to catch up on their volume.
Cutting corners in software development tends to cost a lot more than doing things right the first time, due to both the expense of creating necessary patches and the loss of customer confidence that comes with major failures. Kanban Software Development tracks the process and keeps it moving so that progress is made in a more predictable and reliable fashion.
