An Investigation of Approaches to Set Up a Kanban Board, and of Tools to Manage it

This paper presents a survey with the intent to address a series of issues of the Lean-Kanban approach in the software development, and specifically the guidelines and tools used to set-up a Kanban board. Following the Lean principles, a software process can be broken down into steps and managed with a Kanban approach. Despite the recent increase of interest on the subject, there is no standard definition of Kanban system for software development, and the specific practices of Kanban have not yet been rigorously defined. The purpose of this work is a rigorous analysis of the available information, through research questions and answers, to show the state-of the-art about how Kanban approach is presented and used, in particular those related to the Kanban board management, and to study how they are addressed in practice. We used the methods of Evidence-based software engineering, performing a systematic review of the available information. In our opinion, the information gathered might be very useful to people considering Kanban board adoption, and to the whole community of agile developers practicing Lean-Kanban system approach.