Pipeline Stall
On one of our teams the QA is away on holiday. Whilst they have been away we have slowly seen the QA queues backing up. This was mentioned at the standups and the team was alerted, but at the time spare slots were still available.
In todays standup the QA queue had backed up and the development pipeline was beginning to stall. One of our developers was making great progress on his stories but commented he would have no where to move completed work to as the QA limits had been reached.
This resulted in a team discussion where it was agreed that one of the developers would have to assume the role of QA and test items that he hadn’t worked on.
This was without prompting from me and was great to see the team swarming round an issue.
Kanban in action!
Corey talks about queue utilisation as a leading indicator
The regulating power of the in-process inventory limit is that it tells you about problems in your process while you are experiencing the problem. You don’t have to extract a belated confession from a stubborn problem-solver or wait for the end of the month to have a review in order to notice that something went wrong. You watch it going wrong in front of your eyes as it happens.
