Best Practice for Sub-Teams

[Timo Beyel]

Good morning!

We are currently planning to use Kanban in our team. The team contains Windows, Android, iOS, Mac and API/Backend developers, which means that individual stories and tasks can only be assigned to specific developers (specialists)

Windows, iOS, Mac and Android depend on the API guys (an API feature needs to be done before a feature can be implemented in the app) and in order to limit WIP for the API guys and make the dependencies visible to the whole team, we want to have one Kanban board for the whole team. I know that Scrum and Kanban both prefer cross-functional teams in order to avoid this kind of dependencies, but we can't solve that in the beginning.

I would like to set a WIP limit for each individual sub-team e.g.

Windows : 4

iOS: 2

Mac : 2

Android : 2

API: 6

If I would set the "In Progress" limit to 16, it would be possible to have 16 Windows related tasks in progress, although there should only be 4.

I could not yet figure out, how to apply this as the "In Progress" Column only supports a "global WIP limit". I thought about using Components to reflect each sub-team and then using swimlanes per component but it seems not possible to limit WIP per component.

What is the Best Practice to solve this?

[Mirek]

Hi @Timo Beyel ,

I suggest to first think about the workflow and then create Board for each individual team and set specific limits and if you want to see all simply create another board that would include all issues. Those actions that depends on other should be reflected on all boards.