Kanban is a pull system. Period. In Kanban everyone pulls the task from the previous stage to another. Developers pull tasks which are ready, quality engineers pull tasks which are built, release managers pull those which are tested, and so on, and so forth. Basically every operation on the board happens that way.
Well, almost.
There is one interesting thing I realized talking some time ago with Nadia Zemskova in Copenhagen. In one situation we usually have push instead of pull operation. When? Consider a typical Kanban board where a backlog is split into two columns: long-term backlog where you put everything you’re going to build and short-term ready column or to do queue where you put just a few tasks of highest priority at that moment. The board which looks like that:
Now, what is happening here is usually a part of job of product owner or product manager: they have to choose what the most important thing to be build at the moment is and push them into production process. Um, have I just used the word push?
But that’s exactly what happens. When working with backlog we don’t just pull first thing from because first we have to decide what is going to the top. When we prioritize features we look though all of them as we theoretically have to compare every possible pair of features and say which one is more important or more urgent. We actually decide what exactly will be built in the first place. We push a bunch of features into to the top of the queue or, in other words, into production process.
From this point the whole process is pull but the first stage works the other way round. There are two differences between first stage and the rest.
First, when prioritizing features we usually work on big pool of them – actually all of them which are in the backlog. Later we usually don’t have more than just few features to choose among and very often we can pretty safely assume all of them will be completed soon enough.
Second, at the beginning prioritization is crucial part of our activity – we make conscious decisions what should go first and what should go next. Later in vast majority of situations we can use simple mechanisms like first in first out and it would work well. At the beginning we can’t go with something like that as we’d be building our software in rather random manner. And that doesn’t sound like a great idea if you ask me.
That is why we retreat to the good old push to manage backlog.
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