Kanban Flow Simulator has been moved to the awesome Kanbanize!
The refreshed version can be accessed here: https://kanbanize.com/simulation
About Modern Software Development!
Kanban Flow Simulator has been moved to the awesome Kanbanize!
The refreshed version can be accessed here: https://kanbanize.com/simulation
Great tool! Thanks
Cheers!
This is an awesome simulator, thank you Mateusz!
Thanks 🙂
Would be great to be able to export a kind of log from the statistics. So we can see the data/stats changing during the lifecycle of the simulation
Great idea 🙂 That wouldn’t be hard to implement, because all data is available, but… I am not developing it actively anymore. Maybe at some point will get back to it!
Please respect Kanban, it’s not just a board with tickets and some graphics it’s also a system to learn.
You have a lead time but for what ? Where is the customer on your graphics ? What does he think ? Where is the continuous improvement ?
Kanban from lean please respect that.
This is just a *flow* simulator, not a real life 😉 This kind of board is commonly used in teams using kanban principles. My goal was to help myself and others see the Little’s Law in the context of hypothetical team board. This is by no means a real life scenario. Why do you think I’m not respecting anything here?
Where are the bugs? Where are the human mistakes and estimation errors? Where are the changes to things in progress? Where are dependencies and blocked items? This assumes only forward motion. As it currently stands, this is a _very_ simplistic model and wholly unrealistic.
Besides, this is 100% waterfall Kanban. People are doing their focused work, then handing the outcome to the next person. Agile is about teamwork – focusing on something and delivering it as quickly as possible. Agile Kanban looks so different.
While I applaud the idea of simulating Kanban, I’m fearful that this does more damage to good use of Kanban in Agile systems. This _may_ work in a factory, where things are largely predictable and things usually move only forward. For intellectual work (and that’s what the labels on top of the columns indicate), this is very wrong. Sorry.
Thanks for the valuable input Petri.
Let me comment on the “waterfall kanban” first – you can setup the flow so that the whole team is working on all steps of the task’s lifecycle. More details are in the help section here: https://mgajdzik.com/kanban-flow-simulator/help/
Whether you want your items to move only to the right or you allow moving them left as well, it’s up to the team and agreed policies. Team can decide that items are moving only right and whenever a rework is needed a new card is created. It’s just harder (not impossible) to measure the predictability of the flow when things are moving in all directions. I agree that real life is not that easy to model on a board, but hey, this is what we do all the time – sprints, story points, scrum/kanban boards, monte carlo and so on and on.
We simplify things to understand the general principles that are mostly correct (like if we do less at any given time, we will do it quicker, unless…) to make better decisions. This simulator aims to simplify team’s flow to understand and observe Little’s Law (and a bit more) that applies to any real team, not to redefine the Kanban. And just to reiterate – it’s not the whole story.
So, what is very wrong here?
Mateusz – I like the tool as far as it goes. I think what is missing is context. Petri leapt to conclusions because you didn’t help him see your intended use.
You might also prompt people to make 3-4 different runs through the game, with different conditions. Start with Waterfall/Kanban and then encourage cross skilling. See how far it takes the player.
Also consider after good game play there should be debrief questions that help people draw conclusions.
FWIW I also have a half finished game – teamsgame.agilepainrelief.com
I’m still enjoying and sharing this work Mateusz. Thank you 🙂
This is a very useful flow simulator, Mateusz! 🙂 I was looking for sth. like this as a tool to experiment and communicate flow principles. It has a good mix of configuration parameter to variate the simulation. Thank you very much! Great work!
Just one question: Could you explain the meaning of the value tab in configuration. I set up a very easy one piece workflow with one activity, one worker and no variability for task creation, 1 task p. day etc. When I set “value p. day (mean): 100 $”, “Value per day (variation): 0”, “Capitalisation start after (from task creation): 0” and “Capitalisation duration: 1” I expected to see 100$ value delivered per day. But stats in “Economics” tab showed 0 value over the whole time period.
This changes if I set “Capitalisation duration: 3” or higher, but the value delivered is now much highre tan expeced: 6,000$ after 5 days. I guess I got it wrong.
Excellent Mateusz