1. Kanban and Agile at Scale
Gil Irizarry
Constant Contact
June 2012
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2. Start with Lean Principles
• Eliminate Waste
• Build Quality In
• Create Knowledge
• Defer Commitment
• Deliver Fast
• Respect People
• Optimize the Whole
Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are not the Point by
Mary and Tom Poppendieck
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3. Add Kanban Principles
• Start with what you do now
• Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary
change
• Respect the current process, roles,
responsibilities & titles
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4. Properties of Kanban
• Visualize the workflow
• States in the team board are a reflection
of how a team completes its work
• Limit work-in-progress (WIP)
• Manage Flow
• Aim for continuous flow
• Make Process Policies Explicit
• Improve Collaboratively
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5. Pull, not Push
• Work items should be accepted by the team.
• Work should not be pushed onto the team
by the organization.
Pull: Push:
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6. Some tools and techniques
• A value stream map to identify the work
states in a process
• Kanban board that has lanes mapped to the
identified states
• Cumulative flow diagram to chart the
progress and status of work
• Metrics such as cycle time to identify where
to improve
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7. Kanban at scale
• Implied in the principles is that there are no
iterations.
• Teams should work continuously.
• However, still need software releases or
other integration activity that’s often iterative.
• How to address this dilemma?
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8. The Release Train
• If a deliverable misses a release (the train), it
simply waits to capture the next one
• We don’t penalize a team if a deliverable is not
done at the end of a release and misses the
release train
• Teams plan and test continuously
• It’s OK if a team pulls functionality from a
release within a release cycle
• It’s OK if a team starts work for the next release
in the current release
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9. Automation
• To make this work, as much as possible needs
to be automated
• Automated builds upon code check-ins
• Automated tests built into the builds
• Automated deploys of successful builds
• Automated e-mails containing results of build
and test runs
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10. Frequent deployments
• Code built but waiting to be deployed is not
producing value
• Shorter, frequent deployments bring value to
your customers sooner
• Again, automation is the key
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11. Milo the dog
• Etsy – Code as Craft
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12. DevOps (DevTestOps?)
• There is a growing movement to reduce, if not
eliminate, the boundaries between development
and operations
• Operations today looks a lot like coding. Should
be scripting everything. This is called DevOps.
• Some have extended the concept to
DevTestOps. QA today looks a lot like software
development too. The days of manually executing
a test plan are over.
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