Kanban is a balm now being used by some Agile development teams to soothe the pain caused by timeboxed development cycles. Jeff Patton’s statement, “Short timeboxes herniate,” sums up that pain (from his excellent post “Kanban development oversimplified”). As a Product Owner with a team that started out using Scrum and has gradually drifted to something else, I identified with all those critiques of timeboxed development.

Management expected the team to deliver user stories every week because our iterations were week-long. So when the team realized at mid-week that they wouldn’t be able to deliver a story by Friday, the team would pick up a small bug to fix just to show something by week’s end. That’s a problem. As a Product Owner I saw this mid-week “save” for the sprint review as pure distraction from more important work. So we dropped the weekly delivery requirement.

When I read Jeff’s article, I realized that the way we were working looked more like Kanban than it did Scrum—except we were still using Scrum words and concepts to discuss and analyze our work. Words like “iteration”, “sprint”, “daily scrum” no longer fit.

As a team, we had let go of the expectations of a sprint, and we were still delivering great value, just on a more natural timetable. I believe our efficiency stepped up when we ceased adhering to the rules of Scrum.

However, because we still spoke in Scrum phrases, our company had not followed-suit. Frankly, without a name and model for what we were doing, we weren’t sure ourselves.

Months have passed since then, and some Kanban ideas have seeped in to our work. But we haven’t embraced any change, really.

Why change? Despite the problems I’ve alluded to, the team is really doing great work. They are delivering value to the company and its customers. So one argument is to simply continue on our course. The other is that we’re already practically doing Kanban, so why not start using words and tools that match?

In my brief review of Kanban, I see that it comes from the Lean Manufacturing philosophy. How it is being used in the Agile world is really taking Kanban as a metaphor. It is adapting a model from the manufacturing world and applying it to the software development world. I’m naturally wary, and so want to critique this adaptation for the sake of clear-headedness.

First, let me admit that of all the Agile flavors, Kanban seems the most practical to me. I’m a fan. That said, software development is not an assembly line. We don’t deal with pre-designed units like car doors. Instead, we have a variety of problems and need to be able to design a system to appropriately handle whatever those problems happen to be.

Whereas Kanban works well for an assembly line that puts the cars together, software development looks a lot more like the design shop that engineers and prototypes new car concepts or revisits problems with existing cars to make them more efficient and safer for the next model year. Sure, we produce applications, but a whole lot of the work is really design work.

Design work tends to be iterative and recursive, but I don’t see words from Kanban that support iterative work. In general, a card moves from left to right across the board. Sometimes, the card ought to be killed and restarted with the  ideas we’ve learned during it’s first round. However, from what I see of the Kanban model, this just doesn’t happen. (Not that is happens in Scrum either.)

Why is that? Maybe it’s because coding is expensive and we suffer from the sunk-cost bias. That seems like flawed thinking.

Maybe, as I wrap up this half-thought-out post, I’m simply frustrated by the lack of deep design work in our projects.

More later. I’ve been thinking of the design process with insights from some recent research and articles seen via SIGCHI, and it may result in some design management postings.

Anyone else have ideas to share here?