Kanban (development) Interview Questions & Answers

Question 1. Explain What Is Kanban?

Answer :

A Kanban is a like a flash card carrying all the information about the status of your work and the work required to be done on the product at each stage of software development cycle. In simple terms, it classifies your work in three categories, TO DO -> WORK IN PROGRESS -> DONE.

Question 2. What Is The Advantage Of Using Kanban?

Answer :

The advantage of using Kanban is:

• It helps an organization to lower the costs
• It creates a work site that can respond to changes quickly
• It facilitates the methods of achieving and assuring quality control
• Allows the team to reach their maximum potential
• When priorities changes Kanban works best
• It can deliver feature faster due to their shorter cycle times
• Remove the activities that are of least concern or no concern to the team or organization
• Rapid feedback loops increase the chances of more motivated, empowered and higher performing team members.

Question 3. Mention Some Of The Key Differences Between Scrum And Kanban?

Answer :

Scrum:

• You have to do daily standup meetings
• Iteration is a part of Scrum
• Task is designed and structured in such a way that it fits within iteration
• Board is reset at every sprint
• The process involves three people scrum master, product owner, and scrum team
• Retrospective is required

Kanban:

• Daily stand up meeting is not required
• Iteration can be used as optional; it can be even driven
• There is no size limit for the task
• Board is more or less remains same
• There are no defined roles
• Retrospective is not required

Question 4. On What Principle Does Kanban Works On?

Answer :

Kanban works on three principles:

1. It helps to visualize the task you working on and the items in context of each other
2. It helps to balance the workflow for teams, so they don’t commit themselves to unnecessary work or overburden of work
3. On completion of any work, it pulls out the most prioritized work from the backlog.

Question 5. What Type Of Kanban Board Is Used For Testing And Programming In Gaming?

Answer :

Game developer often uses Heijunka board.  The benefit of Heijunka board is that, unlike simple scrum design board, this board allows all staff to work independently.  This will reduce the redundancy among the team, and the team does not have to wait for another unit to finish their task.

Question 6. What Does Online Kanban Board Provides?

Answer :

• It gives real-time visibility into what people are working on
• It helps you to visualize, optimize and take control of your workflow
• It helps to limit work in progress to prevent bottlenecks
• It helps to collaborate in real time with team members
• Using the horizontal swimlanes it helps to track multiple projects on one board.

Question 7. What Information Does Kanban Analytics Provides?

Answer :

• Kanban analytics provides information about the workflow and removal of any bottlenecks
• Improves and monitor work efficiency
• Provides estimation time for the completion of the task
• To get a quick insight into project status use breakdown charts
• Using cumulative flow diagram measures cycle time

Question 8. What Information Does Time Tracker Gives In Kanban?

Answer :

Time tracker provides detail summary about the work done at that instant of time.  

It is useful in many ways like:

• Time reports by project, user or task
• Detailed reports about the work done
• Manageable time entries
• Easy time tracking

Question 9. What Are The Features Of Online Documents In Kanban?

Answer :

In Kanban, with online document features you can do things like:

• Pin up documents to tasks and upload them to your cloud storage
• Collaborate in real time on Google drive
• Link to file on Box, Onedrive and Dropbox

Question 10. How Kanban Is Useful In Project Management?

Answer :

With the help of Kanban, you can organize your work into projects:

• Build project teams
• Invite people to join the team
• Share and collaborate on work to do- using online Kanban boards.

Question 11. Mention What Is “power-ups” In Kanban? What Are The Different Types Of “power-ups”?

Answer :

In Kanban, Power-ups allows you to customize your board as per your need.

 It adds various spectrum of features to your Kanban board like:

• Card block
• Card aging
• Developer tools
• Team activity widget
• Task navigator
• Auto-assign
• Add task box
• Calendar widget
• Web attachment

Question 12. Explain How You Can Link A Card Together In Kanban?

Answer :

To link card together in Kanban, there are two ways:

You can use tags to link two cards: First you have to create cards and have to link cards using the same tag (Eg: guru99), and then you can search all tasks linked using search option

Using unique URL: Each card in Kanban has unique URL, and you can copy this URL and paste it to another card’s external link fields.

Question 13. Where Should You Put The Kanban-items That Fails The Test?

Answer :

It is very important to differentiate the developers about the test case that is failed and returned and the test case that is ready or fresh to test.  In order to differentiate this to the developer, you can split READY option in Kanban into two categories a) Re-open b) Ready.  Re-open option status will have test-cases that are failed while ready option should have new test case that is yet to be tested.

Question 14. Explain What Is The Best Way To Track Progress When Using Kanban?

Answer :

While using Kanban, the best way to track progress is Cumulative Flow Diagram.  It replaces burndown/burnup chart for Kanban teams.

Question 15. Explain How To Release With Kanban?

Answer :

Kanban tells you more about how to manage the flow of work rather than how to release the work.  However, there are few steps that might be helpful while releasing work or product in Kanban.

They are:

• Release in Kanban should be every two weeks on a schedule
• To avoid too many sticky notes in the “done” section, and to run the process smoothly, inform the business unit about releasing the product or work
• Release the item early which is of high priority and needed immediately.

Question 16. Is It Possible To Generate Kanban Labels From Trac Tickets?

Answer :

Yes, it is possible through an open source solution known JimFlow, and it can interact with Trac Tickets.  

There are few benefits of it like:

• It print tickets directly out of the ticket system
• It supports flow boards having columns
• It can take photos in custom intervals
• With ticket title and type it can generate digital version of the board
• Update ticket in ticket system on movement.

Question 17. Explain Why Scrumban Is Preferred More Over Kanban?

Answer :

The benefits of Scrumban is:

• No need for upfront planning
• Involves team concept unlike Kanban
• It involves sprint and increase the productivity of the team compare to Kanban
• No changes can be done to Sprint Backlog
• Product Owner can be involved in the team
• Daily Scrum- it helps the team to self-organize and self-manage
• Sprint review- it involves business stakeholders, and they can give their feedbacks
• It includes retrospective.

Question 18. Explain What Is The Meaning Of Cycle Time And Throughput?

Answer :

Productivity is estimated in terms of cycle-time:

Cycle Time: It is the length of time to complete the process.

Throughput: It is the sum of the output from a process in a given period of time.