All The Useful Kanban Interview Questions & Answers

Q 1. Explain what is Kanban.

A Kanban is a like a flash card carrying all the information about the status of your work and the work required to be done on the product at each stage of software development cycle. In simple terms, it classifies your work in three categories, TO DO -> WORK IN PROGRESS -> DONE.

Q 2. What is the advantage of using Kanban?

The advantages of using Kanban are:

It helps an organization to lower the costs
It creates a work site that can respond to changes quickly
It facilitates the methods of achieving and assuring quality control
Allows the team to reach their maximum potential
When priorities changes Kanban works best
It can deliver feature faster due to their shorter cycle times
Remove the activities that are of least concern or no concern to the team or organization
Rapid feedback loops increase the chances of more motivated, empowered and higher performing team members

Q 3. Mention some of the key differences between scrum and Kanban.

Scrum  
You have to do daily standup meetings
Iteration is a part of Scrum
Task is designed and structured in such a way that it fits within iteration
Board is reset at every sprint
The process involves three people scrum master, product owner, and scrum team
Retrospective is required

Kanban

Daily stand up meeting is not required
Iteration can be used as optional; it can be even driven
There is no size limit for the task
Board is more or less remains same
There are no defined roles
Retrospective is not required

Q 4. On what principles does Kanban works on?

Kanban works on three principles:

It helps to visualize the task you working on and the items in context of each other
It helps to balance the workflow for teams, so they don't commit themselves to unnecessary work or overburden of work
On completion of any work, it pulls out the most prioritized work from the backlog

Q 5. What type of Kanban board is used for testing and programming in gaming?

Game developer often uses Heijunka board.  The benefit of Heijunka board is that, unlike simple scrum design board, this board allows all staff to work independently.  This will reduce the redundancy among the team, and the team does not have to wait for another unit to finish their task.

Q 6. What does an online Kanban board provide?

It gives real-time visibility into what people are working on
It helps you to visualize, optimize and take control of your workflow
It helps to limit work in progress to prevent bottlenecks
It helps to collaborate in real time with team members
Using the horizontal swimlanes it helps to track multiple projects on one board

Q 7. What information does Kanban analytics provides?

Kanban analytics provides information about the workflow and removal of any bottlenecks
Improves and monitor work efficiency
Provides estimation time for the completion of the task
To get a quick insight into project status use breakdown charts
Using cumulative flow diagram measures cycle time

Q 8. What information does time tracker gives in Kanban?

Time tracker provides detail summary about the work done at that instant of time.  It is useful in many ways such as:

Time reports by project, user or task
Detailed reports about the work done
Manageable time entries
Easy time tracking

Q 9. What are the features of online documents in Kanban?

In Kanban, with online document features you can do things like

Pin up documents to tasks and upload them to your cloud storage
Collaborate in real time on Google drive
Link to file on Box, Onedrive and Dropbox

Q 10. How Kanban is useful in project management?

With the help of Kanban, you can organize your work into projects
Build project teams
Invite people to join the team
Share and collaborate on work to do- using online Kanban boards

11. What is 'Power-Ups' in Kanban? What are the different types of 'Power-Ups'?

In Kanban, Power-ups allows you to customize your board as per your need.  It adds various spectrum of features to your Kanban board such as:

Card block
Card aging
Developer tools
Team activity widget
Task navigator
Auto-assign
Add task box
Calendar widget
Web attachment

Q 12. Explain how you can link a card together in Kanban.

To link card together in Kanban, there are two ways:

You can use tags to link two cards: First you have to create cards and have to link cards using the same tag (Eg: guru99), and then you can search all tasks linked using search option
Using unique URL: Each card in Kanban has unique URL, and you can copy this URL and paste it to another card's external link fields.

Q 13. Where should you put the Kanban-items that fails the test?

It is very important to differentiate the developers about the test case that is failed and returned and the test case that is ready or fresh to test.  In order to differentiate this to the developer, you can split READY option in Kanban into two categories a) Re-open b) Ready.  Re-open option status will have test-cases that are failed while ready option should have new test case that is yet to be tested.

Q 14. Explain what is the best way to track progress when using Kanban.

While using Kanban, the best way to track progress is Cumulative Flow Diagram.  It replaces burndown/burnup chart for Kanban teams.

Q 15. Explain how to release with Kanban.

Kanban tells you more about how to manage the flow of work rather than how to release the work.  However, there are few steps that might be helpful while releasing work or product in Kanban. They are

Release in Kanban should be every two weeks on a schedule
To avoid too many sticky notes in the 'done' section, and to run the process smoothly, inform the business unit about releasing the product or work
Release the item early which is of high priority and needed immediately

Q 16. Is it possible to generate Kanban labels from trac tickets?

Yes, it is possible through an open source solution known JimFlow, and it can interact with Trac Tickets.  There are few benefits of it like

It print tickets directly out of the ticket system
It supports flow boards having columns
It can take photos in custom intervals
With ticket title and type it can generate digital version of the board
Update ticket in ticket system on movement

Q 17. Explain why Scrumban is preferred more over Kanban.

The benefits of Scrumban is:

No need for upfront planning
Involves team concept unlike Kanban
It involves sprint and increase the productivity of the team compare to Kanban
No changes can be done to Sprint Backlog
Product Owner can be involved in the team
Daily Scrum- it helps the team to self-organize and self-manage
Sprint review- it involves business stakeholders, and they can give their feedbacks
It includes retrospective

Q 18. Explain what is the meaning of cycle time and throughput.

Productivity is estimated in terms of cycle-time.

Cycle Time: It is the length of time to complete the process.
Throughput: It is the sum of the output from a process in a given period of time