Getting ready

Kanban literally translates as signboard or billboard. Accordingly, your number-one task is to visualize your team's workflow. You do this by identifying the types of work and handoffs that occur regularly as your team moves items off the backlog and into a shippable state. The main workflow stages performed by our PartsUnlimited team are captured here as Analyze, Develop, Test, Deploy, and Feedback. Each column corresponds to a work stage the team performs on each item before it can be considered done: 

The work item does not have all of these states, but the beauty of the Kanban board is that it allows you to map multiple workflow stages to a work item state. So, in our example, the develop, test, and deploy stages can be mapped to the work item state active. This can be done right from within the Configure team settings dialog in the board view, without having to modify the process template. Columns allow you to visualize the workflow that's used to deliver requirements to production. Swim lanes, on the other hand, help visualize the different streams of work. Let's see how we can set up columns and swim lanes.