How Kanban/Lean fit into the Agile movement
Kanban, although not technically an Agile method, shares many similar attributes. The Toyota Production System (TPS) was founded on the principle that people were at its heart.
You may find some people are initially skeptical that it is possible to translate practices from Lean manufacturing to software product development. They argue that there are very few similarities between a production line and a software development process. Production lines are doing the same repetitive tasks over and over again in sequence, which is often associated with a predictive planning approach. However, using Just In Time manufacturing, Toyota has created and evolved an approach that makes their assembly line much more responsive and adaptive than any other.
The Lean approach to process management has already strongly influenced the thinking of those who formed the Agile Alliance. Many of the methods the practitioners created incorporate aspects of Lean already, such as Scrum's use of the Scrum Board to make work visible. XP and Scrum's use of iterations to manage batch size and create JIT thinking about the requirements and implementation of software products. These are just a couple of examples of how Taiichi Ohno and his work with others at Toyota have influenced how we build software.