Noodling on Kanban… Part Three

Earlier today we noodled on the secret sauce… maybe even THE most important value add… of implementing a看板system.看板gives us a very visual way of identifying and elevating the constraints in our system. The ONLY way to really get a team to go faster is to increase capacity at the constrained steps in the development process. Building inventory in other parts of the system leads to waste and re-work.

If you get nothing else out of this little series… that is your take-away.

For today… we are going to talk about going无迭代. So far we haven’t really talked about the iteration but most看板teams have figured out how to live without them. We’ll talk a bit about how to measure progress without being able to measure velocity at iteration boundaries. Without iterations… without velocity… we need another measure of team throughput…. and that is where cycle time comes in.

去Iterationless

While agile is fundamentally designed toaccommodate变化，迭代的想法意味着您打算建立什么的确定性，即使确定性仅在未来两到四个星期。在某些环境中，客户迫不及待地等到迭代边界引入更改。在某些环境中，需求不能整齐地融入一致的时间窗口中。

This understanding has led some teams to abandon the iteration all together and now consider planning at iteration boundaries to be a wasteful activity. These teams have opted toward working directly from the prioritized product backlog and only bringing new work to the team when the work in process limits allow a new feature to begin. Agile introduced the idea of small batch sizes by limiting the amount of work that could be pulled into the iteration.看板teams take this approach to the extreme and reduce the batch size at any one time to that of a single user story.

实施这种方法的团队具有广告hoc当团队准备新工作时，计划会议。他们进行定期进行操作审查，以使团队绩效，与管理层进行沟通并评估系统的整体健康状况。团队选择合适的boundaries对于传统的回顾，但它们不一定与运营审查或任何预定的时间盒.

Velocity versus Cycle Time

敏捷团队可以通过稳定产品积压的规模并随着时间的推移建立一致的速度来预测。我们可以通过将其总尺寸除以团队的速度来评估固定范围产品积压的交付日期。同样，我们可以使用速度进行权衡decisionswhen trying to manage to a fixed delivery date release. Without the iteration, there is no longer a fixed period of time from which the team can measure team velocity.

看板teams replace velocity with the notion of cycle time. Cycle time measures the total elapsed time from when the feature was started until it is marked complete and accepted by the customer. Cycle time can be useful for predicting delivery and making both short-term and long-term customer承诺.Becuase功能是独立的，并且不是分配给固定范围冲刺的，团队始终可以遵守业务的最高优先事项。亚博vip9通道

Many看板同样大小的团队将跟踪周期d stories, making a distinction between the cycle time of a one-point story versus the cycle time of the other possible story point values. If the team becomes proficient at breaking down user stories into similarly sized increments of work, estimation is no longer even necessary, and cycle time becomes the only metric necessary to measure the delivery capability of the team.

What’s Next

The next and final post in this series will talk a little about why you might want to choose看板and a bit about Corey拉达斯‘ work onScrumban… an interesting hybrid of Scrum and看板用于过渡的团队。我们还将在与几个客户一起介绍的一些工作中遇到一些工作看板boards for project/portfolio management.