I often get asked by Agile teams what should go on a Kanban board during sprint planning. The short answer is: It depends on what works well for you as long as you are maintaining the spirit of the methodology by keeping everything visible on the board and “Just-in-time”.

Some companies focus on recruiting highly qualified full stack developers that can work on different areas such as database design, business logic, front end, testing, integration.. etc. In this case, I believe the best option is to use only user stories on the Sprint board. Each developer will be able to handle a full user story and move it across the Kanban board as a one coherent unit which reduces the overhead of handoffs and coordination with other developers. Also it makes easier for the product owner to verify a full user story rather than trying to combine multiple tasks together to create a testable narrative. Continue reading →