Kanban

Kanban is a method for managing work that emphasizes visualizing the flow of tasks, limiting work in progress (WIP), and continuous delivery rather than fixed iteration cycles. It was developed by Toyota engineer Taiichi Ohno in the 1940s as a system for managing factory inventory, and adapted for software development in the mid-2000s by David Anderson and others.

The four core practices

A team practicing kanban does four things:

1. Visualize the work. Every task is represented as a card on a board. The board has columns — typically Backlog, In Progress, Review, and Done — and cards move through them as work progresses.
2. Limit work in progress. Each column has a maximum number of cards. If a column is full, no new work can enter it until existing cards move out. This forces teams to finish what they've started before starting more.
3. Manage flow. Track how long cards take to move from start to finish (cycle time) and look for bottlenecks where cards pile up.
4. Improve continuously. Hold short, regular retrospectives focused on smoothing the flow.

Kanban vs. scrum

The most common confusion is between kanban and scrum. Scrum organizes work into fixed-length iterations called sprints, with a planning ceremony at the start and a review at the end. Kanban has no sprints, no fixed iterations, and no mandatory ceremonies. Work flows continuously; cards are pulled from the backlog whenever there's capacity.

For most small teams that ship continuously, kanban is the better fit. Scrum's overhead (planning meetings, sprint reviews, story-point estimation) only pays off when teams need to commit to fixed deliverables on fixed dates.

How GritShip handles this

GritShip is a kanban-first tool. The default project view is a board with columns and cards, optimized for keyboard-first movement (N to create a card, drag-and-drop or arrow keys to move it across columns). There are no sprint cycles, no story points, and no planning ceremonies built into the tool — because the small teams GritShip is built for don't need them. If you do, Linear is the better fit.