Review By: Matt Gelbwaks
07/27/2011

As David Anderson likes to point out, he is, perhaps, the principal force behind the kanban movement in software. He has been responsible for most of the kanban conferences and has certainly written the definitive book. Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for your Technology Business will prove valuable for the entire spectrum, from the casual reader to the experienced practitioner. There are a lot of interesting points to consider—both those directly associated with kanban and peripheral topics ranging from Theory of Constraints (early and late development) to agile, Scrum, and basic traffic-flow analysis within the Olympic peninsula.

The book starts with some history and explanation of the approach and then moves into some simple examples, replete with anecdotes of actual use. It then progresses to more advanced topics, such as process improvement and the requisite scaling of the process. It is here that the book shines.

Often, methodology books talk to the common denominator in order to engage the broadest population of readers. Frequently, this forces the author to produce trivial examples that, though easily understandable, are hard for new or casual readers to expand to something similar to their operational environment. David starts with simple and true-life examples, giving readers a clear understanding of the process and a clear indication of how it looks in real life. Then, in the section on scaling, instead of throwing out platitudes or even complex examples, he explains how to actually scale the process. In chapter 13, he writes, "How do we deal with these challenges? The answer is to look to first principles." This is the key statement for me, for anything—not just kanban.

Read the book. Try the process on some simple situations (perhaps a bug-fixing point release or a minor update), then do a retrospective and "look to first principles." That will tell you how and why to expand and scale the process to your other projects or to the rest of the company. Methodology always works best when you can clearly understand the basic principles it stands upon. Knowing them allows you to use them and apply them abstractly as your situation grows out of the realm of other people's examples. Though there are many gems in the book on how to establish and run a kanban system, this gem pays for the cost of the book.