Answers to common Kanban questions
When discussing Kanban with other teams the following common questions are asked:
Do all items that enter the queue have to be the same size?
We T-Shirt size our items. As we track these as a team you can tell the customer “on average it takes us this long to implement a Small sized feature/story to live” or “on average it takes us this long to implement a Medium sized feature/story to live” etc. This really helps with planning and gives the customer data to draw upon when deciding on what they next want implemented. In an ideal world, all items would be of similar size, which will give you a single, reliable cycle-time and throughput. However, its not critical. You can categorise items by T-Shirt sizing them (S, M, L) to get a range of cycle times and use this in your planning.
Is there a “how to” for Kanban
Work in progress by Karl Scotland who is creating and excellent guide here
I would also highly recommend Corey Ladas Scrumban book. I have suggested this is required reading for everyone in our development department!
Should the board not contain tasks only stories?
There is no right or wrong answer here, its up to you! We track by feature/story and not by task, the tasks are to do list items
If a story is moved to Ready for QA and the QA pulls this into their queue to test, what if they then find a bug? Does the story have a blocker associated with it and they raise a new item in the backlog to fix? Does the story move back in to a previous state of Dev Ready? Moving an item back seems to blow the ability to track using CFDs.
No right answer but options here We raise a bug (pink Post-it) and place this in the dev ready queue. Written on the Post-it is the story/feature it relates to. Once it has been completed and passed QA then it comes off the board (but is recorded so we can track and look to improve our engineering quality)
