I'm pretty keen on Lean/Kanban and we've been iterating on our process for a while, initially through a customized workflow in JIRA, but that's not exactly frictionless given the admin complexity in the enterprise version. We've now expanded our use of a whiteboard and have decided to iterate our process using the whiteboard for a while before re-codifying it in JIRA. Here is an example of our layout:
- We are 6 developers
- When a story is in dev, it's on a dev's desk. Likewise with being reviewed, being QA'd, etc. This means every card on the board represents and actionable item, and also provides a decently accurate snapshot of iteration progress. The rule is that only in exceptional circumstances do you have more than one card on your desk.
- We've agreed not to have more than two cards "pile-up" in the Awaiting Review column. This maintains a degree of "flow".
Backlog | Awaiting Dev | Awaiting Review | Awaiting Design | Awaiting Deployment | Awaiting QA | Done |
Story11 | Story2 | Story9 | Story 6 | Story1 | Story9 |
Story3 | Story7 | | | | Story12 |
Story8 | Story10 | | | | |
| | | | | |
| | | | | |
This is pretty close to mapping the value stream except for the awaiting deployment part, which is a hack to fix the problem where QA can't QA an item until we've deployed it on their server - we deploy 3/4 times during a 2 week iteration.
One thing I have noticed from mapping the value stream on an "information radiator" is that it does magically focus people on the actual value-add work that needs to be done, and that seems to up the pace of business-value development and keep up momentum.
Hope that helps!
