Kanban Summary and Notes

Introduction

Kanban is a team structure where work is organized around a process that involves a kanban board, WIP limits, and team structure that is similar but slight different than scrum.

WIP

Each board has a Work in Progress (WIP) limit that prevents the team or individual team members from working on too much at the same time. It also encourages the team to "swarm" to help each other when they cannot pull in a new story. A lower WIP limit can help with pair during programming work as well.

Board

A pull system is used rather than a push system. Typically a ticket will be marked as "ready" for the next process via some sort of flag (color, icon, etc). This tells the next person that they can pull that ticket to their column when they have capacity. This also allows the next person to pull in their own work when they are ready instead of pushing work to them and potentially overloading them with excess.

GIT

Typically a kanban team works around a trunk-based git structure that encourages continuous integration and continuous delivery. As work is finished, it is continually pushed to production. The team will also make use of feature flags in order to prevent work that is not yet ready from being visible by the end users if it is pushed to prod.

Team Structure

A kanban team is usually made up of a 'Product Owner', 'Agile Coach', 'Programmers', and other "makers" (creatives, testers, etc) on the team. The team is will contain every needed member to ensure work continues to move forward, without the need to reach out to outside teams for help.

Meetings

• Daily Standup (15 minutes)
• Replenishment
• Retrospective
• Demos