What is "kanban"

The Kanban consists of a space - represented by cards - showing the stages of the workflow with the activities and assignments of the team members. It is a "pulled" system, that is, an activity is only pulled from one stage to another respecting the amount of work that the team supports.

The picture Kanban shows the bottlenecks (activity overload points) in the process, which decreases the time normally spent to identify the problem. In order to solve these bottlenecks, Kanban limits the WIP (Work-In-Progress) for when the number of activities involved in a given step is equal to the stipulated limit number. In this way, activities of the previous stage will be blocked preventing the continuation of the flow.

It is important to point out that the Kanban does not describe the practices to be used in the development, it only provides the visibility necessary for monitoring the project.

Additional reading: how the method works Kanban