Manage Your Project Work Flow With Kanban Board At Visual Studio Online

Introduction

This article will help to manage your project workflow with Kanban Board in Visual Studio Online.

What is Kanban board?

The Kanban board is a convenient way for visualizing and managing the work in progress, showing what is being worked on, who is doing what and the overall progress of the project. The board shows the 20 first items in your backlog, ordered by their Backlog Priority field.

Note:

Make sure, that you have created your project on your Visual Studio Online account. Follow my previous articles, before getting on to this demo.

Links:

• Click here to create a free Microsoft account (Outlook/Hotmail).
• Click here to learn, how to create Visual Studio Online account and creating a new team project with TFVC being added with inviting the members to work on it.
• Creating a team project with Git.
• Connected IDE Experience in Visual Studio Online.
• Customize your Visual Studio Online Project.
• Work with Sprints at your Visual Studio Online Team Project.

Developer Requirements

1. Microsoft account.
2. Internet Connectivity.
3. Web Browser.
4. Visual Studio Online Account.
5. A project that should be created on your Visual Studio Online.

Follow the below steps to manage your project work flow with Kanban Board at Visual Studio Online,

Step 1: Open your Visual Studio Online project and from the Backlog items view, click the Board link to show up the Kanban board for your project.



Step 2: Now, move some items across the board to change their state.

Note: When, an item is moved from one column to another, its state is set to the one in the name of the column, to reflect the progress being made during the project.



Step 3: Open any item by clicking on it and set the Assigned value to Effort fields. When you close the item, these values will show up in the board.

Note: You can have all the information about the size of the items and who is working on what, at a glance.

Step 4: Click the Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD) on the top right to expand it.

Note: The diagram shows the evolution of the backlog during the last 30 weeks. It is a great tool for gathering a lot of useful information: evolution of the lead time and cycle time, backlog size, bottlenecks, arrival of the unplanned work, etc.


Step 5: Now, close the CFD. Click customize columns.

Note: The Kanban board can be customized to fit the way projects are run in your organization.


Step 6: Change the WIP limit of any of the columns to make it smaller than the number of items contained in it. Click OK. The header of the column will change to reflect that we have more work in that state than the maximum allotted.

Note: Establishing WIP limits per column and tweaking them over time is a great way to improve our process. They help us to focus on a small set of work without leaving a lot of undone items to detect and remove the bottlenecks.



Step 7: Open the customization pane again. Add a new column by clicking on one of the ‘+’ icons.

Note: You can change the name of the existing columns, remove them or add new ones. You can also prioritize the items as they appear on the board. In this way, you can mirror the steps you took to implement any backlog item or feature, from its discovery to its delivery.



Follow my next article to work with the code.