Kanban in Action

Kanban in Action

by Marcus Hammarberg, Joakim Sunden
Released February 2014
Publisher(s): Manning Publications
ISBN: 9781617291050

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Book description

Kanban in Action is a down-to-earth, no-frills, get-to-know-the-ropes introduction to kanban. It's based on the real-world experience and observations from two kanban coaches who have introduced this process to dozens of teams. You'll learn the principles of why kanban works, as well as nitty-gritty details like how to use different color stickies on a kanban board to help you organize and track your work items.



About the Technology


About the Book

Too much work and too little time? If this is daily life for your team, you need kanban, a lean knowledge-management method designed to involve all team members in continuous improvement of your process.

Kanban in Action is a practical introduction to kanban. Written by two kanban coaches who have taught the method to dozens of teams, the book covers techniques for planning and forecasting, establishing meaningful metrics, visualizing queues and bottlenecks, and constructing and using a kanban board.

Written for all members of the development team, including leaders, coders, and business stakeholders. No experience with kanban is required.



What's Inside
  • How to focus on work in process and finish faster
  • Examples of successful implementations
  • How team members can make informed decisions


About the Reader


About the Authors

Marcus Hammarberg is a kanban coach and software developer with experience in BDD, TDD, Specification by Example, Scrum, and XP. Joakim Sundén is an agile coach at Spotify who cofounded the first kanban user groups in Europe.



Quotes
Provides fantastic and patient detail.
- From the Foreword by Jim Benson, Author of "Personal Kanban"

No mucking around … gets to the heart of kanban from the first page. A must-read!
- Craig Smith, Unbound DNA

Many good examples clarify the theory and distill the authors’ practical experience.
- Sune Lomholt, Danske Bank

A practical way to start with kanban … and learn the theory along the way.
- Ernesto Cárdenas Cangahuala, Avantica Technologies

Publisher resources

View/Submit Errata

Table of contents

  1. Kanban in Action
  2. Copyright
  3. Brief Table of Contents
  4. Table of Contents
  5. front matter
    1. Foreword
      1. See and understand
      2. Seeing is half the battle
      3. Too much WIP destroys flow
    2. Preface
      1. Marcus’s journey
      2. Joakim’s journey
      3. The common journey
    3. About this Book
      1. The structure of this book
      2. How to read this book
      3. Author Online
    4. About the Authors
    5. About the Cover Illustration
    6. Acknowledgments
      1. Marcus
      2. Joakim
  6. Part 1. Learning kanban
  7. 1 Team Kanbaneros gets started
    1. 1.1. Introductions
    2. 1.2. The board
    3. 1.3. Mapping the workflow
    4. 1.4. Work items
    5. 1.5. Pass the Pennies
    6. 1.6. Work in process
    7. 1.7. Expedite items
    8. 1.8. Metrics
    9. 1.9. The sendoff
    10. 1.10. Summary
  8. Part 2. Understanding kanban
  9. 2 Kanban principles
    1. 2.1. The principles of kanban
    2. 2.2. Get started right away
    3. 2.3. Summary
  10. 3 Visualizing your work
    1. 3.1. Making policies explicit
      1. 3.1.1. Information radiator
    2. 3.2. The kanban board
      1. 3.2.1. The board
      2. 3.2.2. Mapping your workflow to the board
    3. 3.3. Queues
      1. Entry and exit criteria
    4. 3.4. Summary
  11. 4 Work items
    1. 4.1. Design principles for creating your cards
      1. 4.1.1. Facilitate decision making
      2. 4.1.2. Help team members optimize outcomes
    2. 4.2. Work-item cards
      1. 4.2.1. Work-item description
      2. 4.2.2. Avatars
      3. 4.2.3. Deadlines
      4. 4.2.4. Tracking IDs
      5. 4.2.5. Blockers
    3. 4.3. Types of work
    4. 4.4. Progress indicators
      1. Going goofy: counting down
    5. 4.5. Work-item size
    6. 4.6. Gathering workflow data
      1. 4.6.1. Gathering workflow metrics
      2. 4.6.2. Gathering emotions
    7. 4.7. Creating your own work-item cards
    8. 4.8. Summary
  12. 5 Work in process
    1. 5.1. Understanding work in process
      1. 5.1.1. What is work in process?
      2. 5.1.2. What is work in process for software development?
    2. 5.2. Effects of too much WIP
      1. 5.2.1. Context switching
      2. 5.2.2. Delay causes extra work
      3. 5.2.3. Increased risk
      4. 5.2.4. More overhead
      5. 5.2.5. Lower quality
      6. 5.2.6. Decreased motivation
    3. 5.3. Summary
  13. 6 Limiting work in process
    1. 6.1. The search for WIP limits
      1. 6.1.1. Lower is better than higher
      2. 6.1.2. People idle or work idle
      3. 6.1.3. No limits is not the answer
    2. 6.2. Principles for setting limits
      1. 6.2.1. Stop starting, start finishing
      2. 6.2.2. One is not the answer
    3. 6.3. Whole board, whole team approach
      1. 6.3.1. Take one! Take two!
      2. 6.3.2. Come together
      3. 6.3.3. Drop down and give me 20
      4. 6.3.4. Pick a number, and dance
    4. 6.4. Limiting WIP based on columns
      1. 6.4.1. Start from the bottleneck
      2. 6.4.2. Pick a column that will help you improve
      3. 6.4.3. A limited story, please
      4. 6.4.4. How to visualize WIP limits
    5. 6.5. Limiting WIP based on people
      1. 6.5.1. Common ways to limit WIP per person
    6. 6.6. Frequently asked questions
      1. 6.6.1. Work items or tasks—what are you limiting?
      2. 6.6.2. Should you count queues against the WIP limit?
    7. 6.7. Exercise: WIP it, WIP it real good
    8. 6.8. Summary
  14. 7 Managing flow
    1. 7.1. Why flow?
      1. 7.1.1. Eliminating waste
      2. 7.1.2. The seven wastes of software development
    2. 7.2. Helping the work to flow
      1. 7.2.1. Limiting work in process
      2. 7.2.2. Reducing waiting time
      3. 7.2.3. Removing blockers
      4. 7.2.4. Avoiding rework
      5. 7.2.5. Cross-functional teams
      6. 7.2.6. SLA or lead-time target
    3. 7.3. Daily standup
      1. 7.3.1. Common good practices around standups
      2. 7.3.2. Kanban practices around daily standups
      3. 7.3.3. Get the most out of your standup
      4. 7.3.4. Scaling standups
    4. 7.4. What should I be doing next?
      1. Summing up: what should I be working on next?
    5. 7.5. Managing bottlenecks
      1. 7.5.1. Theory of Constraints: a brief introduction
    6. 7.6. Summary
  15. Part 3. Advanced kanban
  16. 8 Classes of service
    1. 8.1. The urgent case
    2. 8.2. What is a class of service?
      1. 8.2.1. Aspects to consider when creating a class of service
      2. 8.2.2. Common classes of service
      3. 8.2.3. Putting classes of services to use
    3. 8.3. Managing classes of services
      1. 8.3.1 Divide and reclassify
      2. 8.3.2 Size matters
      3. 8.3.3 Some clients are more equal than others
      4. 8.3.4 Slicing it differently
      5. 8.3.5 Zoom in, explore, and simplify
    4. 8.4. Exercise: classify this!
    5. 8.5. Summary
  17. 9 Planning and estimating
    1. 9.1. Planning scheduling: when should you plan?
      1. 9.1.1. Just-in-time planning
      2. 9.1.2. Order point
      3. 9.1.3. Priority filter: visualizing what’s important
      4. 9.1.4. Disneyland wait times
    2. 9.2. Estimating work—relatively speaking
      1. 9.2.1. Story points
      2. 9.2.2. T-shirt sizes
    3. 9.3. Estimation techniques
      1. 9.3.1. A line of cards
      2. 9.3.2. Planning Poker
      3. 9.3.3. Goldilocks
    4. 9.4. Cadence
      1. 9.4.1 Iterations and kanban
      2. 9.4.2 Transition from iteration-based processes
      3. 9.4.3 The kanban approach to cadences
      4. 9.4.4 Don’t go lazy on me
    5. 9.5. Planning the kanban way: less pain, more gain
      1. 9.5.1. The need diminishes
      2. 9.5.2. Reasoning logically: the customer’s plea
      3. 9.5.3. #NoEstimates—could you do without this altogether?
    6. 9.6. Summary
  18. 10 Process improvement
    1. 10.1. Retrospectives
      1. 10.1.1. What is a retrospective?
      2. 10.1.2. How does it work?
    2. 10.2. Root-cause analysis
      1. 10.2.1. How it works
    3. 10.3. Kanban Kata
      1. 10.3.1. What is Kanban Kata?
      2. 10.3.2. What happened
      3. 10.3.3. Why does this work?
    4. 10.4. Summary
  19. 11 Using metrics to guide improvements
    1. 11.1. Common metrics
      1. 11.1.1. Cycle and lead times
      2. 11.1.2. Throughput
      3. 11.1.3. Issues and blocked work items
      4. 11.1.4. Due-date performance
      5. 11.1.5. Quality
      6. 11.1.6. Value demand and failure demand
      7. 11.1.7. Abandoned and discarded ideas
    2. 11.2. Two powerful visualizations
      1. 11.2.1. Statistical process control (SPC)
      2. 11.2.2. Cumulative flow diagram (CFD)
    3. 11.3. Metrics as improvement guides
      1. 11.3.1 Make it visual
      2. 11.3.2 Are you making a business impact or not?
      3. 11.3.3 You get what you measure
      4. 11.3.4 Balance your metrics
      5. 11.3.5 Make them easy to capture
      6. 11.3.6 Prefer real data over estimated data
      7. 11.3.7 Use metrics to improve, not to punish
    4. 11.4. Exercise: measure up!
    5. 11.5. Summary
  20. 12 Kanban pitfalls
    1. 12.1. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
      1. 12.1.1. Creating cadences for celebration
    2. 12.2. Timeboxing is good for you
    3. 12.3. The necessary revolution
    4. 12.4. Don’t allow kanban to become an excuse to be lazy
    5. 12.5. Summary
  21. 13 Teaching kanban through games
    1. 13.1. Pass the Pennies
      1. 13.1.1. What you need to play the game
      2. 13.1.2. How to play
      3. 13.1.3. Questions for discussion
      4. 13.1.4. Main take-aways
      5. 13.1.5. Tips and variants
    2. 13.2. The Number Multitasking Game
      1. 13.2.1. What you need to play the game
      2. 13.2.2. How to play
      3. 13.2.3. Questions for discussion
      4. 13.2.4. Main take-aways
    3. 13.3. The Dot Game
      1. 13.3.1. What you need to play the game
      2. 13.3.2. How to play
      3. 13.3.3. First iteration
      4. 13.3.4. Second iteration
      5. 13.3.5. Third (and final) iteration
      6. 13.3.6. Main take-aways
      7. 13.3.7. Tips and variants
    4. 13.4. The Bottleneck Game
      1. 13.4.1. What you need to play the game
      2. 13.4.2. How to play
      3. 13.4.3. Questions for discussion
      4. 13.4.4. Main take-aways
    5. 13.5. getKanban
      1. 13.5.1. What you need to play the game
      2. 13.5.2. How the game is played
      3. 13.5.3. Questions for discussion
      4. 13.5.4. Tips and variants
      5. 13.5.5. Main take-aways
    6. 13.6. The Kanban Pizza Game
      1. 13.6.1. What you need to play the game
      2. 13.6.2. How to play
      3. 13.6.3. Questions for discussion
      4. 13.6.4. Main take-aways
    7. 13.7. Summary
  22. Appendix A. Recommended reading and other resources
    1. A.1. Books on Lean and kanban
    2. A.2. Books on agile
    3. A.3. Books on software development
    4. A.4. Books on business and change management
    5. A.5. Other resources
      1. A.5.1. Noteworthy blogs
      2. A.5.2. Noteworthy Twitter accounts
  23. Appendix B. Kanban tools
    1. B.1. Standalone tools
      1. B.1.1. LeanKit Kanban
      2. B.1.2. AgileZen
      3. B.1.3. Trello
      4. B.1.4. KanbanFlow
      5. B.1.5. Kanbanize
      6. B.1.6. Kanbanery
    2. B.2. Tools on tools
      1. B.2.1. JIRA Agile
      2. B.2.2. Kanban in Team Foundation Service
      3. B.2.3. HuBoard
  24. Index

Product information

  • Title: Kanban in Action
  • Author(s): Marcus Hammarberg, Joakim Sunden
  • Release date: February 2014
  • Publisher(s): Manning Publications
  • ISBN: 9781617291050