Dan Dan The Kanban Man

Just finished a new page for my Information Radiator. This one shows the progress of user stories through the process. We do scrum and this is a kanban-style board so I’m mixing things up a little bit but I think it’s fine.

Most Salesmen understand waterfall. They promise a feature to a customer within set timescales to get cash. That’s what salesmen will always do. Of course, life gets in the way and something pushes their new feature back. In waterworld they get a nice new Gantt chart which shows what’s been added into the project, they understand why it’s there and accept it. The Kanban board is an agile answer to the same question: “Why are you not working on the trans-galactic hyperdrive I promised? Oh, it’s because you’re fixing a radiation leak in the cosmic flange-o-tron. I agree that’s important and I guess you should fix it before you do my feature”.

The data is pulled from TFS. I don’t differentiate between development and QA on the board because I think it sends the wrong message - we’re just one big team, after all!

Hopefully this board will help those outside of the development and product teams get a better understanding of what we’re working on now, what we’ve finished, what we’re doing next and why. Knowing the answers to those questions gives people a warm and fuzzy glow inside and helps ease inter-departmental tensions.