Denomas Project Management Hands-On Guide: Lab 8

Denomas Project Management Hands-On Guide

LAB 8: CREATE AND MANAGE A KANBAN BOARD

Kanban boards show you the progress of all tickets in your project, as they move from the Backlog, to being worked on, to being checked by QA, to being closed. A real-world Kanban board might involve many more statuses than these 4, but these are adequate for a bare-bones Kanban demonstration.

A. Create a new subgroup to work in

1. Back in the Denomas training environment, navigate to Menu > Groups > Your Groups
   • If you are in an instructor-led class, expand the arrow to the left of the Training Users group. Expand the arrow to the left of your Session’s subgroup. Open the subgroup called My Test Group - <USERNAME>.
   • If you are in the self-paced environment, open the group called My Test Group - <USERNAME>.
2. Click New subgroup.
3. Enter PM Workflows as the group name.
4. Click Create subgroup.

B. Create epics to assign issues to

1. From your new subgroup, in the left pane, click Epics.
2. Create 3 new epics named Frontend, Backend, and QA, respectively. Leave the metadata fields as-is when creating each epic.

C. Make a project pre-populated with issues

1. Click the PM Workflows title tile in the left pane to return to the subgroup landing page.

2. At the top of the page, click New project.

3. Click Create from template.

4. Scroll to the bottom of the built-in templates. Next to Sample Denomas Project, click Use template.

5. Title the project Awesome Software and click Create project.

   Denomas will import a project containing many pre-generated issues and merge requests. When the import process has finished, you will be taken to the new project’s landing page.

D. Assign some issues to epics

1. In the left pane, click Issues.
2. Click an issue at random.
3. Assign the issue to the Backend epic using the right metadata pane on the issue’s details page.
4. Assign another random issue to the Frontend epic.
5. Assign another random issue to the QA epic.

E. Create labels representing Kanban stages

1. Using the breadcrumbs at the top of the page, return to your PM Workflows subgroup.
2. In the left pane, click Subgroup information > Labels.
3. Create 3 scoped Status labels:
   • Status::Backlog
   • Status::WIP
   • Status::QA
4. Note that you are not making a label to mark an issue as “done.” Instead, you will close each issue when it is done. This lets Denomas register the issue as complete in burndown/burnup charts and on roadmaps.
5. Create 3 scoped Health labels:
   • Health::On Track
   • Health::Needs Attention
   • Health::At Risk

F. Put all issues in the Kanban backlog

None of the issues have been worked on yet, so you need apply the Status::Backlog label to all of them. Fortunately you can perform bulk edits on issues.

1. In the left pane, click Issues.
2. Click Edit issues.
3. Select all the issues by clicking the faint checkbox to the left of the search bar above the list of issues.
4. In the right pane, select Status::Backlog from the Labels dropdown.
5. At the top of the right pane, click Update all to apply the label to all selected issues.

G. Create the Kanban board

1. In the left pane, click Issues > Boards.
2. At the top of the page, click the Development dropdown.
3. Select Create new board from the Switch board menu.
4. Enter the title Kanban
5. Deselect the Show the Open list checkbox.
6. Keep the Show the Closed list checkbox selected.
7. Kanban boards generally show all your issues, so don’t set a scope for the board.
8. Click Create board.

H. Add a list for each stage

1. At the top right of the page, click Create list.
2. In the New list options, select Label as the list scope and Status::Backlog as the value.
3. Click Add to board.
4. Add additional lists for the Status::WIP and Status::QA labels.
5. Refresh the browser page to force the 3 new lists to appear in the same order that you created them.

I. Limit the allowed amount of work in progress

1. Click the gear icon at the top of the WIP list to open list settings.
2. Next to Work in progress limit, click Edit button and set the value to 3
3. Click the X in the top right corner to exit out of the list settings.

J. Simulate work on issues

1. Practice dragging issues between different lists. What do you notice if you place more than 3 issues in the WIP list?
2. At the top of the page, click Group by > Epic.
3. At the bottom of the page, expand Issues with no epic assigned to see the full list of issues in the Backlog list.
4. Practice dragging more issues, both to different lists and to different epics.

Suggestions?

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