Visualizing development workflow with Kanban

Jun 1, 2025

Managing a software development project is no easy task. Whether you’re working solo, in a small team, or within a large company, organizing tasks, prioritizing features, and keeping a consistent workflow can quickly become overwhelming. There are many critical points involved, and the better organized and planned things are from the start, the fewer surprises will arise along the way.

In previous articles on project management, we already covered the importance of accurately estimating development time as a foundation for more realistic and effective planning. If you haven’t read it yet, we recommend starting there to get a broader perspective from the beginning.

But estimation is just the first step. Once the work begins, how do you track progress? How can you visualize what each team member is working on, identify bottlenecks, or assess whether you’re moving in the right direction? That’s where a widely adopted technique among software teams comes into play: Kanban.

What is Kanban?

Kanban is a way to manage work through visualizing the flow of tasks. Its main goal is to help you understand, organize, and improve the way your team delivers software. Using a visual board—divided into columns that represent different stages of the workflow—makes it easy to see what tasks are pending, which ones are in progress, and which are already completed.

One of Kanban’s biggest advantages is that it doesn’t require major changes to how your team currently works. It doesn’t rely on fixed-length iterations, predefined roles, or unnecessary meetings. Instead, it’s an evolutionary and flexible approach, ideal for environments where priorities shift quickly or where work flows continuously rather than being split into sprints.

A bit of history: from Toyota to your development team

The origins of Kanban are far from the world of software. In the 1940s, Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer at Toyota, developed a system to improve the flow of production on the factory floor. This system used visual signals—kanban cards—to indicate when materials needed replenishing or when a new step in the assembly line should begin. The objective was clear: eliminate waste and optimize workflow.

This approach became one of the core principles behind the famous Toyota Production System, and later influenced the rise of Lean thinking.

Decades later, the method was adapted for software development by David J. Anderson, who saw in Kanban’s principles an effective way to manage knowledge work. Unlike in manufacturing, software teams don’t deal with physical materials, but rather with ideas, requirements, bugs, and technical tasks that move through stages. And here too, making work visible is essential for improving it.

Core Principles of Kanban

The Kanban method is built on a set of simple yet highly effective principles for managing work in a visual and efficient way. It’s not just about moving cards across a board—there’s a deeper logic behind it that helps teams work smarter, spot blockers, and continuously deliver value.

Before diving into the details, it’s important to understand a core element in Kanban: the card.

On a Kanban board, each task is represented by a card—either physical (on a whiteboard) or digital (in tools like Trello, Jira, or GitHub Projects). Each card holds key information about that unit of work: its title, description, assigned person, current status, and sometimes labels or due dates. These cards move horizontally across the board, reflecting progress from start to finish.

Here are the key principles that drive the system:

1. Visualize the work

At the heart of Kanban is the idea of making work visible. This is done by creating a board divided into columns that represent the different stages of your workflow.

A basic board might include columns like:

To Do → In Progress → Done

Each card moves from left to right as work progresses. This simple visualization allows you to answer important questions at a glance: How many tasks are in progress? Which ones are blocked?

Visualizing the work not only improves time management but also enhances the team’s ability to focus on what really matters. When every task is visible in one shared space, it becomes easier to prioritize, avoid distractions, and reduce context switching. This encourages each team member to focus on completing one task at a time, leading to better quality outcomes.

This level of visibility also greatly improves team communication, since everyone shares the same source of truth. You no longer need to ask who’s working on what—the board makes it clear. Most importantly, it helps you spot bottlenecks instantly. If a column starts piling up with cards, it’s a clear sign that something is blocking the flow and action is needed.

2. Limit Work in Progress (WIP)

One of the most common mistakes teams make is trying to do too many things at once. Kanban encourages setting limits on the number of tasks that can be active in each column—this is known as the WIP limit (Work In Progress).

For example, if we limit the In Progress column to a maximum of 3 tasks, no new work can begin until one of the current tasks moves forward. This simple rule forces the team to finish before starting, and helps reduce context switching—one of the main enemies of productivity.

Start with low limits and adjust them based on your team’s actual capacity.

3. Manage the flow

Once work is visible and constrained, the next natural step is to observe how it moves through the board. Managing the flow means ensuring tasks progress smoothly and without unnecessary interruptions.

Kanban promotes an observational approach: if a task sits too long in one column, if certain stages get congested, or if cards keep moving backward, the system will make it obvious. This allows the team to spot inefficiencies and act quickly to resolve them.

To improve flow management, there are two simple yet powerful metrics you can track:

• Lead Time: the total time from when a task is requested to when it is delivered.
• Cycle Time: the time from when a task starts to when it is completed.

You don’t need complex tools to start measuring these. They provide valuable insights into bottlenecks and help you iterate on your process. And remember, the goal isn’t perfection—it’s getting a little better with each step. Kanban doesn’t tell you how your process should look—it simply shows you how it actually works, so you can manage it more effectively.

4. Make policies explicit

Everyone on the team should clearly understand how the board works and what each column means. The rules for moving tasks forward need to be clear, visible, and shared by all.

For example:

• What criteria must be met for a task to move from To Do to In Progress?
• When is a task truly considered Done?
• What should happen if a card gets blocked?

Defining these policies promotes shared accountability and helps prevent misunderstandings.

5. Continuously Improve

Kanban isn’t a rigid framework or a fixed set of rules. It’s designed to adapt and evolve alongside your team. Its real strength lies in encouraging continuous improvement, driven by real-world observations and ongoing feedback.

As your team uses Kanban and gains experience, it becomes natural to identify areas for optimization: unnecessary stages, columns that could be split or merged, recurring bottlenecks, or unclear policies. Instead of making big, disruptive changes, Kanban lets you adjust your system gradually, while keeping the flow stable.

This improvement doesn’t happen just once or at set intervals—it’s a continuous process. The board becomes a learning tool, not just a tracking mechanism. Each completed task generates data, and each iteration is an opportunity to reflect on how to work better. The ultimate goal is to build a workflow that is sustainable, adaptable, and aligned with your team’s pace and the product’s needs.

A Simple Kanban Board Example

To understand how to apply Kanban from day one, let’s start with a simple structure. Below is an example of a basic board with three main columns:

This type of board is ideal for getting started:

• To Do: planned tasks that haven’t been started yet.
• In Progress: tasks someone is actively working on.
• Done: fully completed tasks.

You can use physical boards with sticky notes or digital tools like Trello, Jira, GitHub Projects, or Linear.

As your team evolves, you can introduce additional columns (such as In Review, Blocked, Ready for QA, etc.) to more accurately reflect your real workflow.

This basic setup lets you apply Kanban’s core principles—visualizing work, limiting WIP, and managing flow—right away, without friction.

Conclusion

Kanban is a powerful and accessible tool that allows development teams to improve the way they work without adopting a heavy or rigid methodology. Its simplicity doesn’t make it any less effective—on the contrary, thanks to its visual nature, minimal rules, and focus on continuous improvement, Kanban adapts easily to teams of any size and type of project.

If you’ve never used it before, you can start today with a basic board and just a few cards. You don’t need to change your team’s structure or abandon your current way of working: Kanban enhances what you already do, one step at a time. Even if you work solo, this method will help you plan and prioritize your tasks more clearly, gain better visibility into your progress, and reduce the chaos when your to-do list starts to overflow.

What about you—are you already using Kanban in your projects? Do you have a board setup that works especially well for your team? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.

But most of all—Happy Coding!