Evolution of Kanban States – Part 3

We have been struggling with the analysis lane on our Kanban board. We have agreed that if you are doing requirements gathering, shaping, sizing, estimating, breaking epics into features/feature sets and writing accpetance criteria then this is all called pre analysis.

This shouldn’t be on the board in the analysis lane and instead should be on our Ideation Board with its own limits. This  gives us two independent pipelines – ideation and engineering.

Our new states are:

• Ready for Development
• Development
• Ready for QA
• QA
• Ready for Live
• Released

We have also moved to using MMFs. We always keep in mind the MMF and denote somewhere on its component stories which MMF they are related to.

We place an MMF on the far left of the Kanban board and its component stories make their way through the pipeline. Only when the sum of all of its parts are complete does the MMF get taken off the board.

You can limit WIP at the MMF level, and subdivide MMF’s into engineering stories that pairs will take on as they can. We have a WIP limit of five dev tasks currently and two MMF’s. So, now that we are talking about two levels of flow (MMF and tasks).

This approach is called a two tier kanban which has been blogged about here and here.