- When Not to Use Swim Lanes Swim lanes on the Kanban board are really handy when different software versions have to walk through the same path or flow. However, they can be deceptive when instead of versions, different development phases have their own swim lanes. Let's say that an imaginary team decides to upgrade its Kanban system and adds the design that precedes the development phase to the board.
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- Visualize and Manage Team Dependency I've been thinking for a while now about how to visualise and manage (reduce) the dependencies between teams. I was watching a presentation the other day where the speaker was using markers to see the current position of certain work items in the flow (in a completely unrelated presentation), and I started to think what if we used the marker concept to see where a work item done by a specific team ends up.
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- About Flows and Infinite Queues An infinite queue is a column on the Kanban board somewhere between the Queue and Live columns, one that doesn't have a WIP limit and into which one can put many work items as one wants. A column without a WIP limit sounds like a bad practice, because if there is no WIP limit what will ensure that the work items are moving - being pulled - forward.
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- The Hidden Inventory A couple of days ago, I had a quick conversation with an old friend of mine about the place of done columns - also known as inventories - on the Kanban board. He wanted to know if the internal done column - where the work items that have been completed in that phase are kept -, or the internal queue column - where the work items done in the previous phase -, was the better option.
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- The Problems of the Capacity Utilization I found a very interesting quote that I wrote in one of my notebooks a long time ago.
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- Waste in Software Development In my community, we love to say the word waste - from lean - out loud. There isn't a meeting without mentioning it at least once, and when it is mentioned, the phrase we have to eliminate waste follows. This is something that is very easy to say.
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- Internal Queue Columns I have less time for coding nowadays, because I have to take care of more organizational and coaching activities. Additionally, I really like to investigate small details and check how they can help improve certain situations. So here is yet another post about Kanban and Kanban boards.
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- Internal Done Columns If a team uses a whiteboard to visualize the workflow, it is quite certain that the team has a Done column. The finished user stories, tasks, cards, etc. end up in this particular column. It is usually the rightmost column on the whiteboards. This year I realized that it is not enough to have a Done column only at the end of the whole value stream, but it is good to have one after each phase.
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- More Kanban Numbers For firefighting situations I prefer using the Kanban framework. It is very informative, and generally keeps things under control. If there are a lot of things to do, people tend to do context switching, which makes them less effective than they could be.
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