Practicing Kanban Using Azure Boards

All software development teams have a desire to increase their flow and throughput. With the powerful combination of Kanban and Azure Boards, they can do just that. This one day course will introduce Kanban and demonstrate how an agile team can configure and use Azure Boards to effectively practice Kanban, achieve flow, and begin improving throughput and predictability. To maximize learning, students will work in teams, in a common team project, on a common case study.

Who should take this class?

This course is appropriate for all members of a software development team, especially those who are actively involved with creating and refining a product backlog as well as planning and executing the work. This course will also provide value for individuals outside the development team (managers, Scrum Masters, coaches, and other stakeholders) who are interested in establishing and improving flow for their team.
Even teams currently practicing Scrum should consider attending this course, as Kanban is a great complementary practice for managing and improving their flow. For more information, read this guide.

Course content

This course contains several modules, progressively explaining Kanban’s principles and practices and how to use Azure Boards to support them.

INTRODUCTION TO KANBAN

Kanban overview

Kanban core practices

Kanban support in Azure Boards

Configuring an Azure DevOps project

Managing a product backlog

Hands-on

VISUALIZING THE WORKFLOW

Kanboard board overview

Kanban board vs. a backlog

Kanban board vs. a taskboard

Defining the workflow

Making policies explicit

Definition of “Done”

Defining classes of service (swimlanes)

Defining task checklists and inline tests

Filtering the board

Keyboard shortcuts

Hands-on

LIMITING WIP

Work in Progress (WIP) overview

Visualizing WIP limits

Creating a pull system

Splitting columns into “doing” and “done”

Challenges with limiting WIP

Bottlenecks

Hands-on

MANAGING FOR FLOW

Flow-based metrics

Cycle time vs. lead time

Little’s Law

Flow-based analytics

Cumulative Flow Diagrams

Scatterplots

ActionableAgile Analytics

Monte Carlo simulation

Achieving flow and predictability

Hands-on