Course Overview

All software development teams have a desire to increase their flow and throughput. With the powerful combination of Kanban and Azure Boards, they can do just that. This one day course will introduce Kanban and demonstrate how an agile team can configure and use Azure Boards to effectively practice Kanban, achieve flow, and begin improving throughput and predictability. To maximize learning, students will work in teams, in a common team project, on a common case study.

Key Learning Areas

  • Introduction to Kanban
  • Visualizing the Workflow
  • Limiting WIP
  • Managing for Flow

Course Outline

Introduction to Kanban

  • Kanban overview
  • Kanban core practices
  • Kanban support in Azure Boards
  • Configuring an Azure DevOps project
  • Managing a product backlog

Visualizing the Workflow

  • Kanboard board overview
  • Kanban board vs. a backlog
  • Kanban board vs. a taskboard
  • Defining the workflow
  • Making policies explicit
  • Definition of “Done”
  • Defining classes of service (swimlanes)
  • Defining task checklists and inline tests
  • Filtering the board-Keyboard shortcuts

Limiting WIP

  • Work in Progress (WIP) overview
  • Visualizing WIP limits
  • Creating a pull system
  • Splitting columns into “doing” and “done”
  • Challenges with limiting WIP
  • Bottlenecks

Managing the Flow

  • Flow-based metrics
  • Cycle time vs. lead time
  • Little’s Law
  • Flow-based analytics
  • Cumulative Flow Diagrams
  • Scatterplots
  • ActionableAgile Analytics
  • Monte Carlo simulation
  • Achieving flow and predictability

Who Benefits

This course is appropriate for all members of a software development team, especially those who are actively involved with creating and refining a product backlog as well as planning and executing the work. This course will also provide value for individuals outside the development team (managers, Scrum Masters, coaches, and other stakeholders) who are interested in establishing and improving flow for their team.

Even teams currently practicing Scrum should consider attending this course, as Kanban is a great complementary practice for managing and improving their flow. For more information, read the Kanban guide for Scrum Teams.

Prerequisites

Team-based development experience recommended.