Kanban derive its name from the Toyota principles of Lean and JIT production process. Some of Toyota’s key principles made it one of the market leaders in low cost production and helped them become industry leader in setting up many practices that others in the industry tried to follow. Kanban as in software development methodology is an approach of Agile product development in which an end product is developed following just in time principles and incremental development approach. As per Wikipedia, it can mean a visual process management system that can mean what to develop, when to develop it and how much to develop?
Kanban software development approach is based on some key principles and properties and those are explained here