Lean from the Trenches

Using WIP Limits

At the top of each column on the board there is a red number. These are work in progress limits (WIP limits), for example “Max Five Features per Team.”

The purpose of WIP limits is to avoid too much multitasking and overloading a downstream process. If the testers have too much work to do, we don’t want developers to keep building new features and adding to their workload—​instead, they should focus on helping test. WIP limits act as an alert signal to highlight the problem before it gets out of hand.

This can be likened to a printer. The WIP limit of a typical printer is one page at a time. If that paper gets jammed, you ...