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Advantages & Benefits of Kanban for Software Teams

Part 2

Benefits of Kanban for Software Teams

Seamless Communication

1 Continuous Delivery

No Estimations

Iterative Workflow

Continuous Improvement

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15Reduced PM Overhead

Cycle Time

Reduction of Waste

Frequent shipping, faster feedback

No Planning Overhead, less Meetings

One-click Analytics

Focus on quality

Pull Principle

Never miss Blockers

Push Notifications with Integrations

The great thing about Continuous Delivery is that itfrees you up from arbitrary time boxes like Scrum sprints. !

Kanban does not use time-boxed iterations. !

Every story leads to working software and ideally to a release.

Continuous Delivery1

Getting estimations right is hard. !

In Kanban you don’t measure how much you can do within a certain period of time. You measure how long a story needs from idea to roll out. !

Priorities are defined depending on what’s important and valuable for the customers, or in any aspect of the startup.

No Estimations2

Kanban is based on iterative work. !

Breaking work into small segments gives the team a sense of progressing successfully.

Since work segments are defined small, changes during a particular iteration preserve the timeline.

Iterative Workflow3

Since work segments are small the team has multiple opportunities to give direction for course corrections during iterations.

Continuous Improvement4

Visualizing work on a Kanban board is of advantage for all team members. !

Information gets easy to process, understand and retain.

Seamless Communication5

Analyze the size of a feature and the time it took from inception to delivery and get a good feeling about the speed of your team.

Cycle Time6

Pro Tip Analyzing cycle time is an evidence based technique of how long work really took until completion. Whereas estimations are hard to get right.

By defining small work segments you eliminate waste in a process and productivity goes up. In software development & project management waste can be: • Defects or Bugs • Over-production • Over-processing • Waiting • Administration

Reduction of Waste7

With small iterative cycles and continuous improvement you don’t need to wait until the end of a project for customers to provide feedback. !

As a positive side effect costs for implementing changes stay low.

Frequent shipping, faster feedback8

In Kanban there’s no sprint planning. !

When you make changes to a sprint it triggers more planning (meetings, communication, scheduling, etc). !

There’s no planning overhead with Kanban.

No Planning Overhead, less Meetings9

Reduced project management overhead because everyone can see the board and know what’s being worked on. !

All stakeholders can see at a glance … !

• who is working on what • at what stage is somebody working on something • what needs to be worked on next • where the bottlenecks are

Reduced PM Overhead10

You can focus on quality because in Kanban there is no … !

• pressure to fit something into a certain timebox. • technical debt backlog. • approving code reviews below your standard.

!

Since there’s less working against a deadline, there’s rarely pressure to skip quality assurance steps.

Focus on quality11

Pull work from left to right and only pull work onto the next stage if it has an open Work-in-Progress slot.Stopping multi-tasking, and context switching leads to better productivity and higher quality.

Pull Principle12

Pro Tip Finish what you’re already working on before you take on more work. “Stop starting, start finishing.”

If work is blocked for some reason, providing context in form of text helps to understand to be able to solve the blocker as fast as possible.

Never miss Blockers13

Pro Tip You can mark Blossom cards as blocked via commit message.

Everytime something interesting happens on your Blossom board we push changes into your favourite instant messaging client like Slack, Flowdock or HipChat and integrate GitHub into your feature cards.

Push Notifications with Integrations

Pro Tip Instant messaging clients notify your team when work gets marked as “Blocked” to get aware and to solve the blocker as fast as possible.

14

Tired of spending hours generating reports?Want to see what took a long time to complete?Need to quickly go over the team’s most recent work?We’ve got you covered. !

Blossom has a “one-click” analytics tab that shows cards with high cycle time, recently shipped cards and a Time in Process Chart.

One-click Analytics15

Thank you for reading!

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