JafTalks

Introduction

In Agile projects, it's a common practice to visualize and share project status using charts or diagrams on boards. While no single document delivers all of the ammunition agile teams need to get the rhythm, this set of visual materials offers an easy framework to help guide software development teams through the various agile cycles.

"Kanban," in Japanese means, loosely translated, 'card or sign'. Kanban is a method which uses standard units or lot sizes with a single card attached to each. A new card is "pulled" into the system only when the work represented by an "in progress" card is completed.

A variation of the Kanban, an easy way to represent these cards, with some enhancements to this representation and a synchronized use of the concept, ArabiaGIS introduced the Sync Kanban concept.

Sync Kanban

The Sync Kanban is composed of a board for each project where the team leader or the responsible developer will try to represent the project status and the features progress with pies.


Figure 1 - Sync Kanban sections

The board will be split into 3 sections, the top left-section named ACCEPTED and the bottom-right section called TO-DO, while the other parts of the board are called DOING.
The ACCEPTED section will be used to represent the accepted features by small colored pies. A feature cannot be added to the Accepted section if it’s not tested approved and accepted.
The TO-DO section will be used to represent the features that aren’t addressed in term of execution yet.
The DOING section is the part of the board that will show the features currently addressed. The feature is addressed from the diagram drawer point of view, in a meaning of, if the diagram drawer is a business analyst, a feature will be in the DOING section if he’s writing its business requirements for example, while for the developer the same feature may be in the TO-DO section.

There are three levels of granularity for Tasks. The top level “Features” and each feature is broken down into “Stories”, and each story into the lowest level “Tasks”.

• A Feature is a function useful and meaningful to users.
• A Story is a testable piece of a Feature, also described in the words of users.
• And a Task is a work unit of a Story, commonly described in terms used by developers.

Sync Kanban covers the first and third level of tasks, by representing the feature by a pie and the tasks by pie slices. Let’s take a look at this diagram:


Figure 2 -A dummy project Sync Kanban Diagram

This diagram is the Sync Kanban diagram of a project composed of five features, map and locator placed in the Accepted section meaning that the two features are well tested and accepted. The events feature is placed in the to-do section what means that this feature has not been addressed. While in the doing section there’re two features the expenditure and the search, both these features are being developed, the colored sections are completed tasks.

Furthermore, the diagram can contain the names of the tasks and any other Meta information as the assigned resources, the time needed to accomplish it.

Sync Kanban variations

In addition to the basic concept of Sync Kanban, a lot of enhancements and variations of this project management representation can be introduced to help more tracking and visualizing the project current status. Here are some additional guidelines and rules that can be added to the Sync Kanban representation:

1. Clock wise priority order rule: The tasks within a feature should be ordered according to their priorities clock wise, for example in the following images you can see the priorities of the tasks.
   
   
   Figure 3 -Sync Kanban Feature - Clock wise priority order
2. Accomplished percentage display rule: The tasks should be colored in a way to show the percentage done of each task. For example the task 1 is 100% completed while the task 5 is 90% completed.
3. Size-Volume rule: each feature in the DOING section will be represented with a pie, the sizing rule of this pie can follow one of the following concepts:
   • Size-Volume-Time rule: a pie will be bigger as much as it’ll take to be delivered.
   • Size-Volume-Tasks rule: a pie will be bigger as much as its tasks count.
4. Slice Size-Time rule: the size of each slice in a feature shows the time needed for the task. The slice 1 is bigger than slice 2 which means that the first will take to longer to be delivered.

Sync Kanban for project manager

Sync Kanban can be applied on all levels, in a meaning that the project manager can track his projects on a single board by representing each project in one pie containing the main features of the project, and the team leader or the developer can represent each feature of his project by a pie showing the main tasks of the feature.

Benefits of Sync Kanban

Some commonly observed benefits are:

1. Project status become clearly visible in real-time. This leads people to collaborate to optimize the whole value chain rather than just their part.
2. Provides a more gradual evolution path from waterfall to agile software development, thereby helping us as we’re finding problem moving to agile.
3. Provides a way to do agile software development without necessarily having to use time-boxed fixed-commitment iterations such as Scrum sprints.

Last word

As Agile project management methodologies is widely spread worldwide and as Kanban is used to track the project statuses in the biggest firms, ArabiaGIS has introduced the new variation of Kanban the Sync Kanban.

More Information

Agile Sync Kanban web site: http://synckanban.info

Bassem Aridi – Hasan Jaffal