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Kanban

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Scrum. Six Practices of Kanban - Agil8 Blog. I first started using Kanban in 2008 whilst coaching a team responsible for a graphics component within a leading mobile OS.

Six Practices of Kanban - Agil8 Blog

I was managing the training and consulting engagement associated with a Enterprise roll-out of Scrum to the organisation across 160+ teams in the UK, Finland, Europe, US, India and China. After six months or so it was becoming clear that a small minority of the teams were really struggling with Sprint Planning – and it appeared to be more serious than the normal challenges of learning how to do Scrum that every team goes through. In the spirit of genchi genbutsu I elected to roll-up my sleeves and get involved with one of them myself. What I found was typical of development teams who have been the early adopters of Kanban over the last few years. Fundamentally their backlog was very unpredictable due to the large number of critical legacy code issues that they had to deal with. This tends to be the first Kanban practice that teams adopt. Kanban in a nutshell. [Health Warning: looking at this still quite popular post 3 years on, I worry about its focus on kanban the tool, not on Kanban the method.

Kanban in a nutshell

Best read in conjunction with Introducing Kanban through its values and Values, understanding & purpose. If your interested in Agile software development I can recommend Learning together: Kanban and the Twelve Principles of Agile Software too.] Step back, squint a little, and think of your development project organised in a big to-do-list. In your imagination, pin your to-do, in progress and done deliverables onto a board like so: Hold that picture for a few more moments and visualise those tokens moving across the board as work gets done.

That three-stage process is of course an over-simplification, so let’s map it out in a little more detail. In my model (yours may differ): The items here are all features, recognisable by the people that sponsored them, even where the team has chosen to break the larger ones down to manageable size. Here’s a CFD: TinyPM » tiny effort, perfect management - agile collaboration tool. Kanban: Is it in the cards? (Page 1 of 7)People often ask, “Why should I use kanban?”

Kanban: Is it in the cards?

Or “Why switch from scrum to kanban?” These questions show that we need to communicate better what kanban is and why many people are starting to use it. Kanban is a lean method that takes our current process and enhances it to provide better predictability and risk management. It can take an agile (or waterfall) method that has stalled and bring it back to life, creating a custom solution based on the unique needs of the organization. It creates a culture of continuous improvement so that we get better at scheduling and delivering our work while our workers are happier in their jobs. Kanban is lean. Let’s consider a typical development scenario: A batch of work items, such as features, is planned for completion at the end of a 2-week iteration time box. Then the work begins and reality sets in.

What could help this situation? Kanban does not replace the current development process; it is overlaid on top of it. Kanban In Practice. My team has been using a Kanban board to manage our day to day work flow for the past few months having switched from time boxed iterations, what follows is a description of how we use the board in practice.

Kanban In Practice

This post concerns itself only with day to day development and does not cover high level planning. First some context. The team is made up of four developers, a technical lead and myself as project manager. We are responsible for the ongoing development, deployment, support and maintenance of six hosted products that are expected to run continuously. We would expect to release new functionality to the live environment a ‘few’ times a week. The Board Our is board is positioned in clear view of the team and we conduct stand ups in front of it. The board contains 5 sections We limit work in progress in two places, currently we assign roughly a week’s work for ‘Not Started’ and a further week’s work for the combined total of ‘In Progress’ and ‘Ready to Deploy’.

Stories Size Project Dates.