K ANBAN
What If You Weren’t Allowed to Track Bugs? Imagine we were no longer allowed to track bugs on our projects. What would you have to do differently? Well, for one, you’d have to squash bugs on the spot because you wouldn’t be able track them. Second, you would need a way of regression testing that was fast and cheap that ensured that when you did squash a bug, it was really dead and never worked its way back into your system. Third, if you were producing a lot of bugs, you’d want to slow down to find out what was causing so much pain and take steps fix the root cause. This is the kind of attitude and behavior you want to foster on your team. It’s not about debating which bug-tracking system you use. It’s about thinking how you can write software so you don’t need the bug tracker in the first place.
For example, if the team can handle only four things at once, then their WIP becomes four. Anything else that needs to be done gets thrown on the back burner and prioritized, and the team gets to it when they get to it. The other thing that is different is that Kanban doesn’t require iterations. You can simply take the next most important thing off the list and pull the work when your team is ready. The goal of Kanban is flow. You want to flow things across the board as quickly as you can by working on only a few things at once. Here are some advantages to working this way: • You don’t have to get stressed about iterations. – If you are split between operations and project work, you no longer need to get stressed about being interrupted during an iteration (because of, say, production support issues) because there is no iteration. You simply pick up the next item when you are ready and don’t have to reset iteration expectations as you go.
Report erratum this copy is (P1.0 printing, September 2010)
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