Introduction

Kanban is a methodology that constrains the amount of work that can be assigned to a particular workflow state at any one time. This helps teams to optimize their lead time (the time taken from when an issue is logged until work is completed on that issue) or cycle time(time spent working on an issue — typically, the time taken from when work begins on an issue to when work is completed, but also includes any other time spent working on the issue) — that is, the average time taken to complete a task.

Kanban boards offer a way to visually manage your work. If you have ever used a post-it note to remind yourself to do something, you’ve used visual management. Visual management allows teams to see work in progress and understand complex information like processes, task relationships and risks related to a team’s ability to complete work on time.

With kanban boards, one can:

Visually see work in progress
Instantly understand impediments (things causing you to delay) and take steps to remove them
Empower teams to self-manage visual processes and workflows

Advantages of using Kanban boards

Visualizing workflow: Visualizing your existing process and workflow is essential to understanding what the team is currently working on.
Limit work in progress (WIP): Specifying columns constraints allows a team to limit the amount of work-in-progress, as WIP directly affects cycle tim. The team will have visibility into when a constraint has been busted, and can then take corrective action.
Measure cycle times
Identify bottleneck in the process: Whenever items are accumilating in a given column it means there is a problem either in the upper stream or downstream processes. Kanban highlights this issue and forces the team to resolve the problem before embarking on new issues

CATS Kanban board: Issue states and Columns

CATS project on JIRA follows Kanban as a means to visualize work and track progress. This means all issues are registered and managed through a single board; whether they are bugs, support request, new features or improvements. This is aimed at making issue tracking simpler by consolidating all boards into one - the team will only be using a single board.

CATS project on JIRA uses issue status to track issues across the board. The following issue statuses are defined in the project:

	Issue Status	Description
1	Open	Issues which are reported and captured on JIRA. All issues created will have this status until they are triage through he board.
2	In Analysis	Items which are under instigation by the development team. Ones issues are prioritized by the product team for implementation, developers will start investigating and analyzing it to understand the requirement and come up with a plan of action for it's resolution.
3	Ready for Development	Issues which are analyzed and plan of action for it's resolution identified. At this stage issues are ready for the development team to implement.
4	In Progress	Any issues which member(s) of the development team are working on.
5	Resolved	Issues which the development team has completed implementation and testing and primed for testing by QA and Product Team
6	PO Approved	Issues which are tested and validated by the development team and waiting for validation from Product Team (or end users in the case of bugs).
7	Re Opened	Issues which are flagged as resolved by developers but failing to pass QA or Product Team tests
8	Closed	Issues which pass all testing checklist by QA as well as Product team waiting for the next release cycle.

In addition to the above states, CATS Kanban board also utilizes the following columns to progress them through each states.

	Column	Issue States	Description	Owned by	Criteria for moving to the next stage
1	Backlog	Open Re Opened	This column contains all issues which are reported and no action has been taken upon. In addition it also contains issues which were resolved and failed to pass QA or Product Team test.	Product Team	Prioritization by Product Owner
2	Prioritized for Development	In Analysis Ready for Development	Issues which are considered to be important by Product Owner and which need attention of the development team can be found in this column. The development team also uses this column to organize analysis and requirement gathering activities	Development Team	Specification and acceptance criteria identified, plan of action for implementation clearly defined.
3	In Progress	In Progress	All items which the development team is currently working on implementing	Development Team	Issue implemented as per specification and acceptance criteria.
4	Internal Test	Resolved	Issues which are fixed/implemented by developers and passed to QA testing. Testing can be done either on a developer machine of QA environment.	Development Team	Test result is documented on issues and changes are deployed to QA environment
5	Business Validation	PO Approved	Issues which passed QA test by the development team and awaiting validation and testing by Product Team. For Product Team to do testing it's mandatory that changes are deployed to QA environment.	Product Team	If issues pass validation then they will move to 'Done' otherwise they will be re-opened and move to 'Backlog'
6	Done	Closed	Issues which pass all checklist and are deployed to production (live) environment .	Product Team	None

The following diagram illustrates workflow transition described above: