Learn kanban with Jira

In this tutorial, we'll give you step-by-step instructions on how to drive a kanban project, prioritize your work, visualize your workflow, and minimize work-in-progress to prevent your team from being overloaded, all with Jira's free Kanban board.

Once you login to Jira, you will have the option to create a project. When you get the project type selection, ensure you select Kanban software development project. 

Your new Kanban software development project will also include a Kanban board. Once you've created your project, your team's Kanban board is the first thing you'll see. This is where your team will eventually keep track of their work.

In Jira, the Kanban project gives you an out-of-the-box workflow with Backlog, Selected for Development, In Progress, and Done. This lets the product owner add tasks to the backlog, and move them to "ready for development" once the task or user story is fully baked. Team members can then select from that column and move to in-progress and to done. If your development workflow is different, it's easy to add or remove a workflow state. Many teams want to add a QA or reviewing stage in their workflow, for example.

To configure your columns and workflow, click Board in the top-right corner of the backlog, then select Configure.

Once you're in the board configuration page, select Columns from the sidebar. You can either add a status or column with the buttons on the right, or hit the trash icon to remove a column. Once you have the workflow columns you want, hit Back to board in the top-right corner.

Use the Create button to start adding tasks, bug tracking or user stories to your backlog. In Kanban, this is the first column of your board. If you don't have a project or feature in mind, try creating some sample tasks to get started and see how it works.

To rank or prioritize the items in the backlog, drag and drop cards up or down on the first column based on their priority.

It may be helpful to use the priority key when adding issues to the board so that it's easy to visualize when prioritizing. The default settings in Kanban will add swimlanes to your board, one for high priority items, which is labeled "Expedite," and one for everything else. You can also use tools like labels or features within each issue to help you categorize pieces of work.

In Kanban, team members take items from the Backlog or Selected for Development column and move them to In Progress.

We recommended limiting the work that is in-progress. To make this easier, you might consider adding limits to your columns. Doing this will cause a warning to show if your team moves too many tasks to a column.

In Jira, you can add minimum or maximum limits for each column in the Columns section of the Board configuration.

In Kanban, daily stand-ups and retrospectives are optional. However, we recommend that you and your team decide on the cadence of meetings. A daily stand-up can still be beneficial for the team to highlight where there are blockers in their work. It may also be helpful for the product owner to share what he or she has prioritized and why. Figure out what works for your team and try it out — you can always adjust as you go.

At regular intervals, you might take a look at the Control Chart to monitor your team's progress.

The Control Chart is useful because it helps you analyze how your team works. Some questions you might ask are:

• Are certain types of issues taking too long to complete? This may mean that the issues are too complex, or they keep getting bumped for higher-priority work.
• Are issues taking too long to transition from a particular status? This may indicate a bottleneck in your team's process.
• What's your team's rolling average? Is your team getting more efficient? Why or why not?

Many teams love the flexibility of Kanban, but they may start to feel that the first column of their board — the backlog — becomes long and unmanageable. That's why we've added a backlog in Kanban software development projects.

The Kanban backlog gives you a backlog for your board, which is on a different tab in your project. The Kanban backlog essentially gives product managers a bigger and dedicated space to freely build and prioritize the backlog, without distracting the team from their current work. The product manager can then move work from the backlog into "ready for dev" to let the team know the work that's upcoming.

Check out Using your Kanban backlog and Enabling the Kanban backlog for more details.

By now, you may have already realized just how extremely customizable Jira can be. Read on for some advanced tips and tricks that your team can use, to unleash their potential, and finish off work-in-progress faster and more efficiently.

Once you have mastered the art of Kanban, you can start to automate away some of the more repetitive tasks. This is a great way to keep your board clean, your backlog up to date and generally keep your work up to date.

See some of the most commonly used automation rules for Kanban in the Jira Automation Template Library.

Go to library

In step 5, we've already discussed the importance of limiting work in progress. In this section, we'll focus on that more, especially since limits actually highlight any bottlenecks that your team may be experiencing. By highlighting these early on, your team can reshuffle priorities and figure out a realistic plan of action.

You can configure the column constraints of your board by going to the Columns section of Board configuration. From there, set minimum and maximum constraints for each column.

If you have more than 10 issues in either the Selected for Development or In Progress columns, the columns would be colored red at the top:

Note that your board may appear differently if you've enabled the Kanban backlog for your board.

Depending on your team's needs, you can go a step further and configure your column constraints to exclude sub-tasks from the count.

For more details on how to do this, go to Configuring columns.

The Cumulative Flow Diagram is one of the important reports you can ever use when working in Kanban methodologies. The Cumulative Flow Diagram lets your team quickly visualize their effort, and match it against the overall progress of the project.

In Jira, the Cumulative Flow Diagram shows the statuses of your team's issues over a period of time:

Any bottlenecks will appear as a sudden change of the issue statuses in the diagram — whether the change is a sudden rise or fall, it is definitely worth looking into the issues involved.

When predicting potential bottlenecks, the Cumulative Flow Diagram is indeed a tool your team should consider using.