Agile & Scrum Practice Question 8: Kanban WIP Control
Agile & Scrum · Test 1 · question 8 of 10
On a team's Kanban board, cards are piling up in the "Testing" column while Developers keep starting new items because "there's nothing else to do in Development". Cycle times are climbing and stakeholders complain that nothing gets finished. According to the Kanban Guide, which practice most directly addresses this?
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Answer:
The Kanban Guide requires that "Kanban system members must explicitly control the number of work items in a workflow from started to finished." Controlling WIP "should create a pull system": members start an item "only when there is a clear signal that there is capacity to do so". Here, a WIP control would stop Developers from starting more work and push them to help clear the testing queue, which is what actually brings cycle time down.
- A is wrong: visualizing the workflow is a Kanban practice, but more columns only make the queue more visible. Without a limit on WIP, work keeps piling up. - B is wrong: it makes the problem worse. More items in progress means longer queues and longer cycle times, not more finished work. - D is wrong: fixed-length iterations with batch commitments are a Scrum-style cadence, not a Kanban practice, and they don't limit the work sitting in the testing queue.
Reference: The Kanban Guide - Actively Managing Items in a Workflow