Kanban (development)

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Kanban (Japanese: 看板, meaning signboard or billboard) is a lean method to manage and improve work across human systems. This approach aims to manage work by balancing demands with available capacity, and by improving the handling of system-level bottlenecks.

Work items are visualized to give participants a view of progress and process, from start to finish—usually via a kanban board. Work is pulled as capacity permits, rather than work being pushed into the process when requested.

In knowledge work and in software development, the aim is to provide a visual process management system which aids decision-making about what, when, and how much to produce. The underlying kanban method originated in lean manufacturing,^[1] which was inspired by the Toyota Production System.^[2] It has its origin in the late 1940s when the Toyota automotive company implemented a production system called just-in-time, which had the objective of producing according to customer demand and identifying possible material shortages within the production line. But it was a team at Corbis that realized how this method devised by Toyota could become a process applicable to any type of organizational process. Kanban is commonly used in software development in combination with methods and frameworks such as Scrum.^[3]