One of the key principles of Kanban is to visualize the workflow. A common practice for that is to have a Kanban board where the proper phases are visualized. In most of the cases, there is a criterion for moving an item from one phase to another, but this criterion is not written down, or in a better case it is written down, but in a word document or in a wiki article. A better idea is to have a separate line on the team’s Kanban board, where the definition of done (DoD) or the exit criteria are set, so that every important and necessary detail of the workflow is in one place.
It may seem like a small thing, but it does not cost much, and I experienced that team members are using it: reading, updating, checking finished work against it. For example, one team member worked a lot at different phases of the flow, and now she gets the possibility to work with other phases. With the DoD on the board, she can check that the work she has done matches the team’s criteria, while she can use it as a checklist, to see what kind of additional work needs to be done on a certain item.
A DoD list for an implementation phase:
-
Unit test cases are written
-
The code coverage is not lower than before for the whole product
-
The code follows the coding standards
-
The code is checked in in the version control system with proper comments
-
The smoke test cases passed
A quick example: if one team member talks about a finished task during the daily gathering, and she says that some parts of the code are not checked in for some reason, the team can check the DoD and discuss how to continue.
comments powered by Disqus