Blog
Mert Özen's blog posts on software development, backend, frontend, and DevOps.
What Is Kanban? From Toyota to Software, and Why It's More Than a Board
Kanban is not a board but a strategy that optimizes the flow of value by limiting WIP; the board only makes it visible. Using the Bookstore support team's board, we trace the path from Toyota's pull system to Anderson's work at Microsoft and Corbis, compare the Kanban Method with The Kanban Guide 2025.5, and introduce the Guide's three practices and four flow metrics.
WIP Limits and Little's Law: Start Less, Finish More
With throughput fixed, raising WIP stretches cycle time by the same factor; Little's Law is the arithmetic behind it. In our C# simulation, raising WIP from 3 to 10 takes average cycle time from 2.4 to 7.9 days, and adding context switching cuts throughput too. We cover Little's Law's assumptions, why it is not a forecasting tool, how to set a first WIP limit and pitfalls like per-person limits.
Actively Managing Flow in Kanban: Blockers, Aging and Flow Reviews
Actively managing flow means reading the board right to left from the oldest item every day, escalating blocked work, limiting expedite and finding the bottleneck with data. We compute CFD band widths from Bookstore data in C#, see how Code Review became the bottleneck in July, how the Theory of Constraints steps solved it (p85 from 16 to 11 days), and why the next constraint is the deploy rhythm.