Recently I worked with a team with –

  • No formal QA process (I was the first QA person in team)
  • Inconsistencies in testing environments i.e. sandbox. environment was not a replica of dev. env
  • Client was relying on third party vendors for their UI/UX requirements
  • No release plan in place and the team was forced to follow tight unrealistic deadlines 🙂 with say please fix these all 32 issues + 4 high priority features before 28th Jan.
  • Long feedback loop and customer complained, well we need something different than what you have built as our requirements have changed now!
  • There was no one to blame for as the problems were not visible early.
  • Lot of micromanagement and no ownership from the team members

The typical path for release looked like this –

Release-cycle

As a team we decided to breakdown the current workflow and we created this Kanban board –

Kanban-borad

The best thing about Kanban is it doesn’t require any additional role (like a Scrum Master 🙂 ) and it doesn’t require any major changes in your current processes.

How it helped us –

  • Better visibility – WIP limits made the blockers visible and people took ownership for swarming if someone is lagging and if the client wants something urgent to be pushed to production
  • No blame game – As every step was clearly visible on board the team ensured that they are removing the blockers for each other and it resulted in good team spirit.
  • Early feedback and stable good quality release – The team worked with consistent pace and client was happy as they were able to play with the product increment on a weekly basis. It was much easier for the team to work on any last minute changes.
  • Building what customer really cares about – Continuous feedback, time boxed sprints and flexibility to re-prioritize sprints helped the team to only focus on features user really need and not the features that are no longer required (due to change in business/scope etc.)
  • No burn out for team – As we were delivering at a sustainable pace the overtime was reduced to 7% which was close to 20% earlier resulting in better job satisfaction and motivation for everyone contributing in a team.