Rescued by Kanban!
By: Mario Kleinsasser
Tags: Leadership, Teamwork, Kanban, Change, DevOps

Some words about Kanban

We can find a lot of comparisons of Kanban and Scrum on the internet. If you a search for “Kanban vs Scrum” in Google, you can find many essays about this topic. There are pros and cons for both methods, but in my opinion, it does not matter what you use, as long as it work for you and/or your team. One of the most important points, at least for me, is, that you can use a Kanban board as a single person, as a team or both. And it is highly flexible in the way you can use it. There are no rules or crazy guidelines on how you should use it. Sure, there are some pinpoints you can consider, like the number of columns you use, Kanban pull signals or a work in progress limit. Alternatively, you can read a bunch of books about Kanban.

But at the end, that’s all theory, and the sole thing that you absolutely can do is to set up a Kanban board and keep moving! That's where you can learn most because true is what works! [watch this video!]

Two years of Kanban

In the following sections, I will try to explain why we launched our Kanban board and how we are operating it today. Maybe you can pickup some of these insights with you or, at least, you have some fun reading this story!😏

The starting point

Before 2016, my team only comprises two people, including myself. In 2017, another colleague joined my team. During the decade between 2008 and 2018, my team was always in one office. Communication was easy to handle because everyone could hear what was going on in which project. But, with the beginning of 2018, one of my colleagues moved to Vienna and my team split up. Before this point in time, we turned to use Kanban to get more transparency into our work about what we are doing all day long and to mange work tasks over distance.

Thus we started a new group called kanban inside our GitLab and opened a project called Hosting Continuous Integration which we use only for our Kanban boards and to handle our issues.

First ten ever created issues for our Kanban

The screenshot above shows the first ten issues we’ve ever created for our Kanban board. As you can see, we started in January 2018 nearly two years ago! Currently, it’s not easily possible to get this data from the GitLab UI directly. I will show you how you can get this data by some simple SQL statements later in this story. For now, the SQL statement to retrieve this list is:

select distinct on (created_at) created_at, title, iid from issues where project_id = 685 order by created_at asc limit 10;

Don’t worry, I am definitely no SQL expert! In the above statement, 685 is the project id of our Hosting Continuous Integration Kanban board. We will jump into the details of SQL for GitLab later. For now, let's have a closer look at our Kanban boards, issues and data.

The Kanban boards

Currently, we use five Kanban boards, called Operations, UC-Co-Responsible, UC-Product, UC-Responsible UC-Update. We will start with the Operations Kanban board, as it is by far the oldest one and the one which we use for the direct work control.

Our Kanban boards

We use the Kanban boards prefixed with UC- for our Update Cycle iterations, but more on them later.

The operations Kanban board

For the operations Kanban board, we use the three major labels kanban::accepted, kanban::todo and kanban::doing besides the two default one's open and closed.

Our major issue labels for our Kanban board

In GitLab, every time you move an issue from one column to another column, the issue will labeled automatically according to the column name. These major labels are so called scoped labels in GitLab and scoped labels are mutually exclusive! Scoped labels can help you tidy up your types of work even more. There’s one book which I recommend you to read, because it covers the idea of a Kanban board. It explains the types of work thinking, and it has a cool story to read. The book name is The Phoenix Project (A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win) and if you need something to read during Christmas holidays, pick up a copy!

Our Kanban board labels

As expressed above, we use a couple of labels to structure our issues and to structure our work. The following picture shows all of our current labels.