Divide Kanban backlog into weeks

Kåre Mulvad Steffensen January 30, 2018

I'm looking for a way to visually divide my backlog on a kanban board, into weeks. We're trying to transition from a sprint setup, into a kanban setup of sorts.

The new backlog in the kanban board is nice, however I'd like to further be able to more visually be able to plan the tickets into different weeks. 

I'm thinking epics might be a way to go, what would you suggest ?


Have been reading up on the scrumban article you have.

2 answers

1 vote
miikhy
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January 30, 2018

Hi There,

I would not recommend to plan into weeks using Kanban at all. In my conception (and I can be wrong here), Kanban is used to track a continuous flow of incoming requests prioritized internally. This would mean, in my opinion, that planning shouldn't be time based but priority based (generally, oldest is highest priority).

As per your precise question, if you're using due dates you can build swimlanes using those due dates such as "duedate <= endOfWeek()" and so on...

Hope this helps!

Kåre Mulvad Steffensen February 1, 2018

Thanks - the endofWeek, combined with swimlanes does give some of the overview i'm seeking

miikhy
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February 2, 2018

Great, glad you've found a solution :)

1 vote
Ignacio Pulgar
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January 30, 2018

Epics is a good way to go, and has some advantages, specially if you need to report on a per week basis (Epic Report) and/or consistently estimate issues (sum up of story points per epic).

Alternatively, and depending on your exact needs, you may prefer to configure several Swimlanes based on Queries, which would display issues ordered in dynamic weeks:

  • created >= startOfWeek()
  • created >= startOfWeek(-1)
  • created >= startOfWeek(-2)
  • created >= startOfWeek(-3)
  • created >= startOfWeek(-4)
  • Everything Else

swimlanes.png

Note that issues will be displayed in the first swimlane from top to bottom which would have been returned by its query.

You might want to create those swimlanes from last to first, so that you get the correct order of swimlanes with no need of reordering them with drag & drop.

The advantage of this approach is that it doesn't require you to perform any actions (further than the one-time configuration of swimlanes) to have issues ordered by week.

Alternatively to using the created date, you might want to use the due date instead, which would also be configurable to use future dates for planning.

Hope it helps.

Kåre Mulvad Steffensen February 1, 2018

It did - makes much sense to do this, and to use duedate against endofweek()

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