How to release often with Lean/Kanban?

Question

I am quite new to Lean/Kanban, but have poured over online resources over the last few weeks and have come up with a question that I haven't found a good answer for. Lean/Kanban seems otherwise such a good fit for our company, who is already using Scrum, but have reached some limitations inside that methodology. I hope someone here can give me a good idea.

As I see it, one of the biggest advantages of Scrum over Waterfall is the use of sprints. By having everything ready every 14 days you get short feedback cycles and can release often. However, as I have understood from reading about Lean, there are some costs associated with this (for example, time spent in sprint planning meetings, team commitment meetings & some problems with finding something useful for everyone at the end of the sprints).

Lean/Kanban will remove these wastes, but only at the cost of not being able to release every 14 days. Or have I missed an important point? For, in Kanban, how can you work on new development tasks and release at the same time? How do you make sure you don't ship something that is only halfway done? And how can you test it properly?

My best "solutions/ideas" so far are:

• Don't release often and allow the waste associated with running out of new development tasks. Not really a solution to the question asked though.
• Develop in branches and then merge into the main trunk. Makes you have to support at least two branches continuously internally.
• Use some smart automatic labelling system to automatically build only certain finished tasks and not others.

As a summary, my question is: When you use Lean/Kanban, can you release often without introducing waste? Or is release often not part of Lean/Kanban?

Additional info specific to my company: We use Team Foundation System & Source Control and have previously had some bad experiences in regards to branching and merging. Could this be solved simply by bringing in some expertise in this area?

Answer 1

The problem you describe seems more a source control program -- how to separate done features from features in-progress, than about Kanban. You seem to put a heavy penalty on running many branches -- which is the case for source control systems not based around the idea of multiple branches. On Distributed Source Control systems, such as GIT and Mercury, everything is a branch, and having them and working with them is lightweight.

I assume you read this blog about Kanban vs SCRUM, and the associated practical guide?

And, in answer to your question, yes, you can release often with Kanban.

Answer 2

The team I manage uses Kanban and we release around every two weeks. If you're strict about what gets integrated into your mainline code branch (tests passing, customer approved, etc.), Kanban allows you to release whenever you want. You need to make sure that the stories moving through your system aren't co-dependent in order to do this, but on my team that's usually not a problem - a large part of our work involves maintenance, which consists of several unrelated bug fixes / features per release.

Answer 3

For source control I'd highly recommend Perforce. It makes branching and integrating changes from other branches relatively straightforward, and provides the best interface for source control that I've seen so far.

Continuous integration helps as well - i.e. lots of small, more than daily commits, instead of huge and potentially challenging merges. Tools like CruiseControl can help highlight when the source gets broken by a bad commit. Also, if everyone makes many small changes then conflicting changes will be rare.

I'd also advice not to try to follow things like lean, scrum, kanban & co. too closely. Just solve the problems yourself, looking to these ideas for guidance rather than instruction. The specifics of your problems will more than likely require some flexibility for the best management.

Answer 4

The way we handled weekly releases on a sustained engineering project that used Kanban was to implement a branching strategy. The devs worked in a sandbox branch, and made one checkin per work item. Our testers would test the work item in the sandbox; if it passed the regression tests the checkin would be migrated to our release branch. We locked the release branch from noon Monday until the release went out (usually by Wednesday, occasionally by Thursday, the drop dead date was Friday), and re-ran the regression tests for all migrated checkins as well as integration tests for the product, dropping a release once all of the tests passed.

This strategy let devs continually be working on issues without being frozen out of their branch during the release process. It also let them work on issues that took more than a week to resolve; if it wasn't checked in and tested/approved it didn't get migrated.

If I were running Kanban for a new version of a project, I'd use a similar strategy but group all related checkins as a 'feature', migrating a feature en masse to the release branch once the feature was done and then performing additional unit/integration/acceptance/regression testing in the release branch before dropping a release with that feature. Note that a key concept of Kanban is limiting work in progress, so I might restrict my team to work on one feature at a time (this would probably be several work items/user stories).

Answer 5

There's more to this than just source control, but your choice of TFS is going to limit you. When the Burton project was conceived back in 2004, Microsoft wasn't paying attention to Agile, much less Lean. It's going to be your weakest mechanical link for some time. Your hackles should have been raised by CodePlex's own adoption of Mercurial after having been offered to the Microsoft community as the poster child of TFS implementation.

A more salient issue here is Work Design. It encompasses the order that you choose to implement features (work schedule), as well as prioritization and cost of delay, and the shape and size of work items.

Scrum is commonly interpreted to say that non-technical "Product Owners" can determine work schedule based solely on their own concerns. If you follow this path, you're going to incur a lot waste by not taking the opportunities to do work together that belongs together. Work that belongs together can't just be determined by Product Owner wishes. Technical and workforce (skills) opportunities must also be taken into consideration.

For work to be done in the most productive way, the work itself has to be designed that way. This means that in a Lan Product Development team, decisions are made not by a non-technical worker, but by what Toyota calls someone of "Towering Technical Competence" who is close to the product, close to the customers, and close to the team.

This role is a stark contrast to Scrum's proposition. A Chief Engineer on a Lean team is himself (or herself) the voice of the customer, and the role of Product Owner is unnecessary.

Scrum's "Product Owner" is a recognition of an under-developed role in software development organizations, but it's far from a sustainable solution that consistently avoids waste. The role of "Software Architect" is often insufficient as well, as in some developer sub-cultures, the architect has become far too removed from the work.

Your issues of continuous deployment are only partially addressed with technology and tools. Look also to organizational issues, and perhaps give some thought to Scrum's purpose as a transitional approach from waterfall rather than one that can serve your organization indefinitely.