For starters typically a Kanban board is made up of three columns as seen below.
Instead of having a product backlog and a sprint backlog like you would see in a scrum agile environment in Kanban you only have one backlog for the product and it occupies the whole of To Do on the Kanban board. As with scrum the very top item in the product backlog is the most relevant/highest value item to work on next on down the list to the bottom. The next available dev team member will just take the next available item and work on it until it is complete at which point they'll then move it over to the Done column.
Kanban is also unique in that it doesn't utilize sprints to complete the work, i.e. there isn't a one to four week time frame for which the work in the To Do column must be completed. While it may seem like there'd never be a break from the action teams can implement certain constraints to the board, i.e. only 2-3 items in the To Do or In Progress columns at a time.
One other benefit to utilizing Kanban is that there aren't a lot of meetings as it pertains to sprint planning, sprint review, and daily stand ups. Also it works well for teams that don't want to do a lot of costing or estimating of each individual item so that they're having to figure out exactly when something will be released and in which sprint. The drawback to that of course is that you then may not know close to when something will be released.
And there you have it. A quick touch on what Kanban is. What do you think? What do you do differently on your team?
No comments:
Post a Comment