YouTrack Server
 

Limit Work in Progress

Last modified: 07 February 2025

Many development teams use a Kanban framework to manage a steady flow of incoming work. While Scrum teams use sprints to limit the amount of work that is performed in a specific time frame, Kanban teams can impose work in progress limits for all active stages of development.

Our product teams at JetBrains establish their own workflows to match their goals, working habits, and personality. The development teams for AppCode and CLion follow a Kanban-inspired framework. They use Kanban boards to manage everyday activities related to the development of these two IDEs.

Here's what the AppCode Kanban board looks like in our YouTrack installation:

Wip limit board

These boards support the following processes:

  • The teams decide whether to add an issue to the board based on a queue of prioritized tasks. This queue is represented by a saved search with a custom order.

  • The teams discuss priorities during daily standups and weekly meetings where members of the team agree on the list of tasks that should be fixed first. The highest priority issues are placed at the top of the queue.

  • When developers want to start progress on an issue from the queue, they just change the value of the Kanban State field.

  • The board is divided into two swimlanes that help the team prioritize their work.

    • Issues that are moved to the board are added to the General swimlane by default.

    • The Priority swimlane is for issues that require special attention and should be resolved as soon as possible.

    The highest priority issues are placed at the top of the queue.

  • The columns on the board use work-in-progress limits that correspond to the number of members in the team. This helps to control the number of activities that happen simultaneously and highlights areas where the teams have bottlenecks.

  • The team leads see the bigger picture, including all the incoming tasks and how are the tasks are balanced between the team members. This helps them decide who can take a new task and see who might be overwhelmed at the moment.

  • As all issues are added to the board automatically, the team doesn't have to work with a backlog.

The Kanban board helps these teams in the following ways:

  • The development team is able to concentrate on the work in progress, rather than sprint scheduling and estimations.

  • All the tasks that are in progress are shown on the board.

  • Team members can swarm to unload column that exceeds work-progress-limits. For example, the developers can prioritize code reviews or help with testing.

This type of board can be useful for any team that regularly prioritizes incoming feature requests and bug reports.