Kanban Development

May 1, 2008 by JurgenAppelo

The experts in our industry have an amazing ability of inventing sexy names for simple things that are as old as my cooking pots.

An example:

I am responsible for our company's intranet application, of which I try to release a new version every month. I have more or less given up on planning of this project, because I work on it whenever there's time. And time, unfortunately, is always in short supply. One month I may be too busy managing dual, triple and quadruple monitors for developers, following up on SharePoint upgrade disasters, or seeking the best tool for tracking surprise features (others call them bugs), while another month I spend all my time training mandrills to mimic the behavior of senior software engineers. All in all, just your typical CIO stuff.

From this it follows that, once every month, I release whatever new features and changes I've been able to build and test for our intranet application. It may be a lot, and it may be next to nothing. Basically, it means that my development activities are decoupled from my increments. This way the users know that at least something is going to be delivered every month, though I'm keeping them in the dark as to what they are getting. They will know it when it's there. I've been doing this for years, and I've always called this approach Common Sense. But now, to my delight, it goes under the much fancier name of Kanban development, and some call this approach a "GREAT idea".

I need to ponder over this for a while. In the meantime, I'm going to find myself something to eat. I don't know what I'm going to eat, but I know it's going to be something. I've been living that way my whole life, always eating at least something every day. Sometimes it's a simple snack, sometimes it's a full-blown 5-course dinner that I had been preparing for days -- usually with the help of my faithful old cooking pots. I guess I can now call it Kanban eating. Fancy that!

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