Agile Glossary

Activities that seek to continuously improve all functions and involve all employees, from the executive level to the level of individual contributors. As such, it applies to processes, such as purchasing and logistics, that cross organizational boundaries into the supply chain. The foundational level of kaizen in a Scrum context is the Sprint Retrospective, such that areas of potential improvement are surfaced by individual teams, so that the team can prioritize and act upon those improvements.

Kanban is a technique that helps visually manage the way work flows though a system, for instance, through a software team's work queue. It is an agile approach that is often overlaid on an existing process–for instance, when a Scrum Team uses a physical or electronic board to see how work is flowing to done–limiting the work in process, and measuring and optimizing that flow of work. To quote from one of the most definitive books on the topic, David J. Anderson's Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business" (aka the "blue book") (p. 12): "In software development, we are using a virtual kanban system to limit work-in-progress...The signal to pull new work is inferred from the visual quantity of work-in-progress subtracted from some indicator of the limit (or capacity)."

Teams make their work visible on a physical or electronic board, such the movement (flow) of work items toward done is apparent. On Kanban Boards, teams agree to Work In Progress (WIP) limits, where for particular workflow states, the number of work items cannot exceed a particular number, which is set by the team. Teams using Kanban Boards also agree to make policies explicit, where they define exit criteria that must be satisfied to move from one workflow state to another on the board.