Introduction
Kanban Boards are often used in Agile projects to help manage work by balancing the demand with the team’s available capacity.
Having the work items and their respective status displayed visually on a Kanban Board allows the team to quickly determine the progress of work from start to finish.
Using a Kanban Board
When capacity permits, team members can pull work from the board rather than having work assigned by someone else. This approach fits well with the self-organising attribute of Scrum teams, for this reason, a Kanban Board is often used for product development in organisations implementing the Scrum framework. When this is the case, each Scrum team typically uses a Kanban Board to measure progress during each Sprint, with the Daily Scrum being a good opportunity to ensure the board is kept up-to-date, the board can be a good tool to drive constructive discussions and decision-making during the meeting.
The two primary purposes of Kanban Boards are to help visualise the team’s work and to limit the Work-In-Progress (WIP). The development team will often impose a hard limit for the number of items that can be in progress at any one time, this number is the WIP limit. When this number is hit, the team should concentrate on completing the work that is already being worked on rather than start new work. This can be especially important in Scrum, as it may mean the difference of whether a feature is completed and the Sprint Goal achieved by the end of the Sprint.
See the image below for an example of a Kanban Board that may be used for the development of software products.
