On June 6th, Rick Garber and I presented a brief overview of our Kanban system for software engineering sustaining releases adopted on my team at Corbis. I'm making a PDF of the slides available for general download. This is very much a first attempt to explain and teach what we're doing to a wider audience. It should be read along with associated blog posts: Kanban in Action, My Approach At Corbis, Kanban Conversation , Six Month Review, April Fool With Meaning, Do you have your Sticky Buddy?.

Abstract

Given an executive directive to focus 10% of engineering resources on maintenance and upgrades through regular sustaining engineering releases of software systems, the Software Engineering Department promised it could deliver a release every 2 weeks. Initially, a traditional project management approach to define scope and schedule with a firm release date was adopted. The results were terrible – the process of gaining agreement on scope, cost estimates and release dates with management alone often took over 2 weeks and the process drained resources from other major projects.

The response was to adopt a kanban system to limit and control work-in-process, coupled with a regular release schedule and a regular prioritization meeting with business owners to introduce work to the system. This kanban implementation utilized a floating pool of resources, delivered a release every two weeks, against a service level agreement of 28 days lead time, and demonstrated 10% resource utilization. The process clearly demonstrated that software development can exhibit all the same phenomena as Lean Kanban Theory suggests. For example, greater variation causes a need for increased queue sizes, larger work-in-process and longer lead times, while expediting also causes longer lead times, lower efficiency in resource utilization, greater work-in-process and ragged flow.

This presentation details the process as adopted and uses real data to explain the results. It shows how the process has adapted over time to improve throughput, reduce lead times, decrease variability, and limit work-in-process.

Download A Kanban System for Sustaining Engineering [PDF 1.5MBytes] Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering, Don+Reinertsen