research-article

An empirical study of WIP in kanban teams

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Dag I. K. SjøbergAuthors Info & Claims

ESEM '18: Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement

Article No.: 13, Pages 1 - 8

https://doi.org/10.1145/3239235.3239238

Published: 11 October 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Background: Limiting the amount of Work-In-Progress (WIP) is considered a fundamental principle in Kanban software development. However, no published studies from real cases exist that indicate what an optimal WIP limit should be. Aims: The primary aim is to study the effect of WIP on the performance of a Kanban team. The secondary aim is to illustrate methodological challenges when attempting to identify an optimal or appropriate WIP limit. Method: A quantitative case study was conducted in a software company that provided information about more than 8,000 work items developed over four years by five teams. Relationships between WIP, lead time and productivity were analyzed. Results: WIP correlates with lead time; that is, lower WIP indicates shorter lead times, which is consistent with claims in the literature. However, WIP also correlates with productivity, which is inconsistent with the claim in the literature that a low WIP (still above a certain threshold) will improve productivity. The collected data set did not include sufficient information to measure aspects of quality. There are several threats to the way productivity was measured. Conclusions: Indicating an optimal WIP limit is difficult in the studied company because a changing WIP gives contrasting results on different team performance variables. Because the effect of WIP has not been quantitatively examined before, this study clearly needs to be replicated in other contexts. In addition, studies that include other team performance variables, such as various aspects of quality, are requested. The methodological challenges illustrated in this paper need to be addressed.

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Cited By

Damij NDamij T(2024)An Approach to Optimizing Kanban Board Workflow and Shortening the Project Management PlanIEEE Transactions on Engineering Management10.1109/TEM.2021.312098471(13266-13273)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TEM.2021.3120984
Guerrero-Calvache MHernández G(2023)Team Productivity Factors in Agile Software Development: An Exploratory Survey with PractitionersApplied Informatics10.1007/978-3-031-46813-1_18(261-276)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46813-1_18
Leal SHauck JBertan MVieira G(2022)How Agile Organizations Use Metrics: A Systematic Literature MappingProceedings of the XXI Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality10.1145/3571473.3571479(1-11)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3571473.3571479

Index Terms

An empirical study of WIP in kanban teams
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development process management

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cover image ACM Conferences

ESEM '18: Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement

October 2018

487 pages

ISBN:9781450358231

DOI:10.1145/3239235

General Chair:
Markku Oivo
University of Oulu, Finland
,
Program Chairs:
Daniel Méndez
Technical University of Munich, Germany
,
Audris Mockus
University of Tennessee

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 11 October 2018

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ESEM '18: ACM / IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement

October 11 - 12, 2018

Oulu, Finland

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Cited By

Damij NDamij T(2024)An Approach to Optimizing Kanban Board Workflow and Shortening the Project Management PlanIEEE Transactions on Engineering Management10.1109/TEM.2021.312098471(13266-13273)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TEM.2021.3120984
Guerrero-Calvache MHernández G(2023)Team Productivity Factors in Agile Software Development: An Exploratory Survey with PractitionersApplied Informatics10.1007/978-3-031-46813-1_18(261-276)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46813-1_18
Leal SHauck JBertan MVieira G(2022)How Agile Organizations Use Metrics: A Systematic Literature MappingProceedings of the XXI Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality10.1145/3571473.3571479(1-11)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3571473.3571479
Guerrero-Calvache MHernández G(2022)Team Productivity in Agile Software Development: A Systematic Mapping StudyApplied Informatics10.1007/978-3-031-19647-8_32(455-471)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19647-8_32

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