Apply kanban in an agile team

Question

How can I apply kanban to an agile team using XP?

Any good advices, articles books?

Answer 1

We've applied kanban to our support process, my team leader blogged about it a few days ago - Utilizing Kanban to Manage Support at Typemock.

Answer 2

Henrik Kniberg has done a good job of explaining the differences between kanban & scrum & XP.

Henrik Kniberg - blog

Henrik Kniberg - Kanban verses Scrum (pdf)

Answer 3

Kenji Hiranabe published an interesting article on infoQ: "Kanban Applied to Software Development: from Agile to Lean". There are others.

Answer 4

I've recently implemented Kanban on my agile team. For a good look as to why you should do this, check out David Anderson's talk at a recent Lean & Kanban conference. David is also the author of Agile Management for Software Engineering, an excellent book and well worth reading. He also has a blog dedicated to Kanban topics.

Answer 5

Sure you can... Kanban will work great in an XP environment. The Henrik Knibjerg blog is the best place to start...

I suggest that you start out with a very simple kanban board, just to get some hands on experience. The most important part to rememnber is the Kaizen part: Evaluate your process often - especially when you're starting to use the tool. I suggest to have an evaluation meeting once every week for at least the first month.

I will also suggest that the team spends five minutes every day together at the kanban board, a little like a Scrum meating. At least in the beginning. This will help your team to get a common understanding of the tool.

My last suggestion is to put some work into the art of describing a task. If the tasks are described in a good way and in the same way by all team members, it will be a lot easier to prioritize the tasks.