Are “Ready For” Columns on Kanban Boards The Enemy of God?

this is going to be a quick rant post, hopefully. today i saw another kanban board which had a “read for test” column on it, here’s the screenshot:

i think “ready for” columns are baaaaad

with most kanban boards you mark a card as done when it’s ready to be pulled into another column. if that means it has to be deployed before a card is ready for test then so be it. the last thing we want is cards just sitting around waiting – this is baaaaaad. “ready for test” usually means it’s either deployed (and yet to be tested) or waiting to be deployed. either way, not much is happening to the work sitting in this column. basically it’s waste (or “muda” as the lean kanban aficionados might call it), and remember, waste is baaaaad.

seriously, i think they’re baaaaad

a result of using these “ready for x” columns is that they tend to slightly move us away from the “stop the line” practice that good lean/kanban systems employ. basically whenever there’s a problem, or a bottleneck is appearing, we want to stop the production line and address the issue. so, if we keep all these “ready for qa” cards in our in dev or code review column (basically whatever column comes before your ready for qa column) then we’ll very quickly reach our wip (work in progress) limit and the line will be stopped. that’s a good thing! we want to catch that bottleneck as soon as we can, we don’t want to hide it by pushing our cards into another “buffer” column.

did i mention that i think “ready for” columns in kanban are baaaaaad?

yet another problem with “ready for x” columns is that they quite often tend to be push rather than pull columns. you can’t really pull into a ready for qa column as it isn’t an actual “workflow” state, it’s a “wasteflow” state (see what i did there?). i mean, who’s going to pull stuff into that column anyway? i’ve yet to meet a “ready for test” team who just sit around pulling cards into their column before marking them as “ready” (presumably once they’ve verified that they are indeed ready for test). ok, you might have a deployment team who are responsible for deploying stuff to your test environments and so forth. in this case, your workflow state still isn’t “ready for test” it’s “in deployment”.

conclusion

“ready for x” columns make baby jesus cry.