Taiichi - An Elixir-based Kanban Simulator
Taiichi Ono was the originator and inspiration for the Lean Manufacturing movement. When I'm working on a project, eliminating his 'Seven Wastes' has become a core tenet for me -
These wastes are:
- Delay, waiting or time spent in a queue with no value being added
- Producing more than you need
- Over processing or undertaking non-value added activity
- Transportation
- Unnecessary movement or motion
- Inventory
- Defects in the Product.
In software development, I see a lot of these - some examples below:
Mary and Tom Poppendieck later translated these seven wastes into "The Seven Wastes of Software Development". See Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit for a more detailed examination, which I'll be borrowing from quite heavily in this series.
- Partially Done Work
- Extra Features
- Relearning
- Handoffs
- Delays
- Task Switching
- Defects
Simulating Kanban
I've used an online Kanban simulator in the past to illustrate some of these issues, but it had some problems that the providers of the closed-source offering were not interested in fixing, so I'm planning to build my own, in Elixir, using the ECSx Entity Component Framework.
Here are all the posts in this series: