Kanban in SDLC
Kanban is an agile development approach, the major aspect of which is visualization of business processes and limitation of the amount of work in progress. The work process is visualized with the Kanban boards that display cards with information about the tasks. Each employee can see the number of tasks in every state on the board and view major information about them.
The tasks are added to backlog in Kanban. The backlog is the list of tasks that need to be done. The new tasks are only taken to work when the team can complete them. It is achieved with the use of WIP limits ("Work in progress") – the limitations to the number of tasks in each state. These limitations help to ensure that the work is distributed equally and prevent the overload of the team with incomplete tasks. The use of Kanban boards makes the delivery time forecastable and adjustable.
You can select Kanban as an approach to the development lifecycle when you create a project.
Kanban board features
The Kanban project boards have certain features that differentiate them from the Scrum boards:
- The list of available elements: columns, swimlanes, swimlane rules, areas, badges, color markers, additional attributes.
- WIP limits are available for the columns and areas. You can use them to limit the number of cards in each column and area.
- The Add tasks to backlog button is available on the board. It opens the Add tasks to backlog widget where you can select the new project tasks to be added to the Backlog column on the board, or create a new task.
- The Collapse all swimlanes, Expand all swimlanes options are available in the board action menu.
Read more on Kanban boards in the Project Boards article.