WIP limits

[htveit]

In our Lean/Kanban flow with Codetree we would like to be able to add Work In Progress (WIP) limits.
WIP limits helps the team identifying bottlenecks in the workflow and the team can fix the process to get back to a normal flow. When having limits to each column, developers on the team is encouraged to get out of the comfort zone and reach out to teammates for assistance. But really, the most important thing is to not be able to start new work when things before other work is finished to avoid multitasking syndrom.

WIP limits are individual to each team, but also to each column. Lets say you have a column called QA, and you only have two people that takes care of this process. That means that the QA guys should not be able to pull more than two issues into this column.

In Codetree, I imagine that you could manage a WIP limit for each workflow stage (column).

The number would be displayed on the column in the board view
When a user tries to drag a card that exceeds the limit I see two possible solutions:

• she would be blocked with a warning

or

• it is possible to exceed, but the column background color would change into something dramatic which clearly indicates that you broke the limit.