Agile Project Management Kanban Method and Practices 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A team's board shows items piling up in the 'Testing' column. What does this most likely indicate?
- A bottleneck where testing capacity is constrained (Correct answer)
- That developers are working too slowly
- That the WIP limit on testing is too high
- That the board needs more columns
Correct answer: A bottleneck where testing capacity is constrained
Accumulation in one column signals a bottleneck where that stage cannot keep pace with upstream flow.
Question 2: What is the recommended first step when implementing Kanban according to its principles?
- Visualize the current workflow as it actually exists (Correct answer)
- Replace all existing roles with new ones
- Set aggressive deadlines for every task
- Adopt fixed two-week sprints
Correct answer: Visualize the current workflow as it actually exists
Kanban begins by visualizing the existing process so the team can see and then improve real flow.
Question 3: How does Kanban handle prioritization of new work items?
- Items are prioritized continuously and pulled as capacity frees up (Correct answer)
- All items are locked at the start of a sprint
- Priority is fixed for a calendar quarter
- Items are worked strictly first-in-first-out with no reprioritization
Correct answer: Items are prioritized continuously and pulled as capacity frees up
Because Kanban is flow-based without fixed iterations, priorities can be reordered any time before an item is pulled.
Question 4: What is 'flow efficiency' in Kanban?
- The ratio of active work time to total lead time (Correct answer)
- The number of items completed per developer
- The percentage of the team present each day
- The total count of columns in use
Correct answer: The ratio of active work time to total lead time
Flow efficiency compares value-adding time to total elapsed time, exposing how much time items spend waiting.
Question 5: Which Kanban practice directly helps a team improve by learning from data and experiments?
- Improve collaboratively using models and the scientific method (Correct answer)
- Adding more people to every task
- Eliminating all meetings
- Removing WIP limits entirely
Correct answer: Improve collaboratively using models and the scientific method
Kanban encourages improving collaboratively and evolving experimentally, using models like flow metrics to guide change.
Question 6: What typically happens when a column's WIP limit is reached and a worker becomes free?
- They help clear the bottlenecked work rather than starting new items (Correct answer)
- They immediately pull a brand new item anyway
- They wait idle until the next day
- They increase the WIP limit on the spot
Correct answer: They help clear the bottlenecked work rather than starting new items
When WIP is full, idle workers swarm to unblock the constraint instead of starting new work, keeping flow smooth.
Question 7: What distinguishes a Kanban cadence from a Scrum cadence?
- Kanban uses continuous flow while Scrum uses time-boxed sprints (Correct answer)
- Kanban requires a Scrum Master role
- Kanban forbids any meetings
- Kanban always uses two-week iterations
Correct answer: Kanban uses continuous flow while Scrum uses time-boxed sprints
Kanban delivers continuously without fixed-length iterations, whereas Scrum organizes work into time-boxed sprints.
Agile Project Management Kanban Method and Practices 3
A team's board shows items piling up in the 'Testing' column.
What does this most likely indicate?