A Review of Lean-Kanban Approaches in the Software Development

We present a review on the state-of-the-art of the adoption of a specific Agile Methodology (AM), the Lean-Kanban, in different software development contexts. Such approach requires to break down the software development process into smaller steps, which are implemented with the aid of a Kanban board. We study 14 different Kanban boards and we also examined how features are represented in the boards and compared 22 software tools for implementing virtual Kanban boards, analyzing also resources available on the web. We analyzed the main features of the Kanban boards actually used, the main activities defining the software development process, the content of the cards representing work units, and also the automation tools available for Kanban board management. Our survey shows that nor standard definitions of Kanban practices exist for the software development, neither specific practices for the Kanban board management have been rigorously defined, and thus Lean development standardization and improvement is still an unaccomplished task for software development.