Table of Contents

Copyright

Brief Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

About this Book

About the Authors

About the Cover Illustration

Acknowledgments

1. Learning kanban

Chapter 1. Team Kanbaneros gets started

1.1. Introductions

1.2. The board

1.3. Mapping the workflow

1.4. Work items

1.5. Pass the Pennies

1.6. Work in process

1.7. Expedite items

1.8. Metrics

1.9. The sendoff

1.10. Summary

2. Understanding kanban

Chapter 2. Kanban principles

2.1. The principles of kanban

2.2. Get started right away

2.3. Summary

Chapter 3. Visualizing your work

3.1. Making policies explicit

3.1.1. Information radiator

3.2. The kanban board

3.2.1. The board

3.2.2. Mapping your workflow to the board

3.3. Queues

Entry and exit criteria

3.4. Summary

Chapter 4. Work items

4.1. Design principles for creating your cards

4.1.1. Facilitate decision making

4.1.2. Help team members optimize outcomes

4.2. Work-item cards

4.2.1. Work-item description

4.2.2. Avatars

4.2.3. Deadlines

4.2.4. Tracking IDs

4.2.5. Blockers

4.3. Types of work

4.4. Progress indicators

Going goofy: counting down

4.5. Work-item size

4.6. Gathering workflow data

4.6.1. Gathering workflow metrics

4.6.2. Gathering emotions

4.7. Creating your own work-item cards

4.8. Summary

Chapter 5. Work in process

5.1. Understanding work in process

5.1.1. What is work in process?

5.1.2. What is work in process for software development?

5.2. Effects of too much WIP

5.2.1. Context switching

5.2.2. Delay causes extra work

5.2.3. Increased risk

5.2.4. More overhead

5.2.5. Lower quality

5.2.6. Decreased motivation

5.3. Summary

Chapter 6. Limiting work in process

6.1. The search for WIP limits

6.1.1. Lower is better than higher

6.1.2. People idle or work idle

6.1.3. No limits is not the answer

6.2. Principles for setting limits

6.2.1. Stop starting, start finishing

6.2.2. One is not the answer

6.3. Whole board, whole team approach

6.3.1. Take one! Take two!

6.3.2. Come together

6.3.3. Drop down and give me 20

6.3.4. Pick a number, and dance

6.4. Limiting WIP based on columns

6.4.1. Start from the bottleneck

6.4.2. Pick a column that will help you improve

6.4.3. A limited story, please

6.4.4. How to visualize WIP limits

6.5. Limiting WIP based on people

6.5.1. Common ways to limit WIP per person

6.6. Frequently asked questions

6.6.1. Work items or tasks—what are you limiting?

6.6.2. Should you count queues against the WIP limit?

6.7. Exercise: WIP it, WIP it real good

6.8. Summary

Chapter 7. Managing flow

7.1. Why flow?

7.1.1. Eliminating waste

7.1.2. The seven wastes of software development

7.2. Helping the work to flow

7.2.1. Limiting work in process

7.2.2. Reducing waiting time

7.2.3. Removing blockers

7.2.4. Avoiding rework

7.2.5. Cross-functional teams

7.2.6. SLA or lead-time target

7.3. Daily standup

7.3.1. Common good practices around standups

7.3.2. Kanban practices around daily standups

7.3.3. Get the most out of your standup

7.3.4. Scaling standups

7.4. What should I be doing next?

Summing up: what should I be working on next?

7.5. Managing bottlenecks

7.5.1. Theory of Constraints: a brief introduction

7.6. Summary

3. Advanced kanban

Chapter 8. Classes of service

8.1. The urgent case

8.2. What is a class of service?

8.2.1. Aspects to consider when creating a class of service

8.2.2. Common classes of service

8.2.3. Putting classes of services to use

8.3. Managing classes of services

Divide and reclassify

Size matters

Some clients are more equal than others

Slicing it differently

Zoom in, explore, and simplify

8.4. Exercise: classify this!

8.5. Summary

Chapter 9. Planning and estimating

9.1. Planning scheduling: when should you plan?

9.1.1. Just-in-time planning

9.1.2. Order point

9.1.3. Priority filter: visualizing what’s important

9.1.4. Disneyland wait times

9.2. Estimating work—relatively speaking

9.2.1. Story points

9.2.2. T-shirt sizes

9.3. Estimation techniques

9.3.1. A line of cards

9.3.2. Planning Poker

9.3.3. Goldilocks

9.4. Cadence

Iterations and kanban

Transition from iteration-based processes

The kanban approach to cadences

Don’t go lazy on me

9.5. Planning the kanban way: less pain, more gain

9.5.1. The need diminishes

9.5.2. Reasoning logically: the customer’s plea

9.5.3. #NoEstimates—could you do without this altogether?

9.6. Summary

Chapter 10. Process improvement

10.1. Retrospectives

10.1.1. What is a retrospective?

10.1.2. How does it work?

10.2. Root-cause analysis

10.2.1. How it works

10.3. Kanban Kata

10.3.1. What is Kanban Kata?

10.3.2. What happened

10.3.3. Why does this work?

10.4. Summary

Chapter 11. Using metrics to guide improvements

11.1. Common metrics

11.1.1. Cycle and lead times

11.1.2. Throughput

11.1.3. Issues and blocked work items

11.1.4. Due-date performance

11.1.5. Quality

11.1.6. Value demand and failure demand

11.1.7. Abandoned and discarded ideas

11.2. Two powerful visualizations

11.2.1. Statistical process control (SPC)

11.2.2. Cumulative flow diagram (CFD)

11.3. Metrics as improvement guides

Make it visual

Are you making a business impact or not?

You get what you measure

Balance your metrics

Make them easy to capture

Prefer real data over estimated data

Use metrics to improve, not to punish

11.4. Exercise: measure up!

11.5. Summary

Chapter 12. Kanban pitfalls

12.1. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

12.1.1. Creating cadences for celebration

12.2. Timeboxing is good for you

12.3. The necessary revolution

12.4. Don’t allow kanban to become an excuse to be lazy

12.5. Summary

Chapter 13. Teaching kanban through games

13.1. Pass the Pennies

13.1.1. What you need to play the game

13.1.2. How to play

13.1.3. Questions for discussion

13.1.4. Main take-aways

13.1.5. Tips and variants

13.2. The Number Multitasking Game

13.2.1. What you need to play the game

13.2.2. How to play

13.2.3. Questions for discussion

13.2.4. Main take-aways

13.3. The Dot Game

13.3.1. What you need to play the game

13.3.2. How to play

13.3.3. First iteration

13.3.4. Second iteration

13.3.5. Third (and final) iteration

13.3.6. Main take-aways

13.3.7. Tips and variants

13.4. The Bottleneck Game

13.4.1. What you need to play the game

13.4.2. How to play

13.4.3. Questions for discussion

13.4.4. Main take-aways

13.5. getKanban

13.5.1. What you need to play the game

13.5.2. How the game is played

13.5.3. Questions for discussion

13.5.4. Tips and variants

13.5.5. Main take-aways

13.6. The Kanban Pizza Game

13.6.1. What you need to play the game

13.6.2. How to play

13.6.3. Questions for discussion

13.6.4. Main take-aways

13.7. Summary

Appendix A. Recommended reading and other resources

A.1. Books on Lean and kanban

A.2. Books on agile

A.3. Books on software development

A.4. Books on business and change management

A.5. Other resources

A.5.1. Noteworthy blogs

A.5.2. Noteworthy Twitter accounts

Appendix B. Kanban tools

B.1. Standalone tools

B.1.1. LeanKit Kanban

B.1.2. AgileZen

B.1.3. Trello

B.1.4. KanbanFlow

B.1.5. Kanbanize

B.1.6. Kanbanery

B.2. Tools on tools

B.2.1. JIRA Agile

B.2.2. Kanban in Team Foundation Service

B.2.3. HuBoard

Index