What is Kanban?

Kanban is a continual delivery, lean-scheduling process focused on helping people work together more effectively as a team. The goal of both Kanban and Scrum is to deliver products just in time. However, Kanban uses the stages of the SDLC to track the progress of work items from requirement gathering to the delivery of the product or software. These different swim lanes are BACKLOG, SELECTED FOR DEVELOPMENT, IN PROGRESS, and DONE.

Unlike Scrum, Kanban doesn’t follow an iterative approach and it has a long development period that is incremental in nature. Since there are no iterations, work items don’t need to be started or ended at a specific time, rather, it depends on other factors, such as the priority of the work item, resource availability, the complexity of the requirements, and so on.

A Kanban board is used to track work items and their progress. It also helps teams to impose limits on the number of work items they want to add to the selected development stage. This enables smooth, consistent, and continuous delivery. By enabling limits, it reduces the overhead of managing or switching tasks between multiple items. A team can plan, estimate, design, and move each work item once it reaches the priority list of work items to deliver on it.