Should a "story" item navigate the kanban columns?

[Paulo Afonso]

Hello!

My team is working with kanban and we always pass the Story item through all the columns. But this is making some troubles in my cycle time (and lead time) charts, because this item always has the longest stay in each column.

Should I not pass this item through the columns? And where should I stay that?

Thanks!

[John Funk · Accepted solution]

Hi Paulo,

What you are basing your cycle time/lead time on? You could probably exclude Stories from the charts if you want. 

But I also think that Stories probably represent the real work going on and what is being deployed? Or are you deploying stand along sub-tasks? So Stories are probably more realistic for your actual lead time. 

[Paulo Afonso]

Hi John!

We have the story items, and after the Planning the team creat sub-tasks (or bugs along the development) items associataed to the story item. Thus, the development team pulls the sub-task and bug items along the columns, but also pulls the Story items together.

So, when I see the cycle time charts, I have two different types of items being calculated; one that represents a "abstract" ideia, the story item, and the others that represents the real, concret work by the team (sub-task and bug items).

So my question is: how should I analyze the cycle time in this case? Using all items, using only sub-task items and bugs, or using only story items?

Finally, what I want to calculate are three indicators: the bottleneck time for each column (I think in this case I have to consider only sub-tasks and bugs); the cycle time of the stories (the true time of development of each story); and the lead time.

[John Funk]

Sorry for the very long delay in responding. 

I would simply measure the parent Story item because that's what is is really getting deployed to the user. 

You can still get the bottleneck time based on the Story without having to go to the sub-tasks/bugs.