Kanban & Flow Vocabulary | Agile & Scrum Exercises

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Your team's Kanban board has a WIP limit of 3 on the "In Progress" column. It currently shows three items in progress. A developer finishes a task in the "Review" column and wants to immediately pull a fourth item into "In Progress".

What is the correct Kanban response to this situation?

The Kanban principle here is: "Stop starting, start finishing." When a WIP limit is reached, the correct response is to swarm on existing work to move it forward — not to bypass the limit:

Action	Effect
Pull new item despite WIP limit	Increases multitasking; slows everything down; invalidates the WIP limit
Help finish an in-progress item	Reduces WIP; improves flow; frees up capacity for the new item faster
Raise the WIP limit	Should only happen after deliberate team discussion and retrospective evidence — not ad hoc

WIP limits exist to surface bottlenecks and encourage collaboration. A developer can review code, test a feature, or pair on a blocker — all of which move existing items forward without starting new ones.

2 / 5

Your team is introducing flow metrics to stakeholders. The engineering manager asks:

"When you say cycle time improved from 4 days to 2 days, does that mean we're responding to customer requests twice as fast?"

Which response correctly explains the difference between cycle time and lead time?

Lead time and cycle time measure different spans of the same work item's journey:

Metric	Starts when	Ends when	Measures
Lead time	Request is made (ticket created)	Work is delivered	Customer-perceived responsiveness
Cycle time	Work actually begins (moved to In Progress)	Work is delivered	Team's processing efficiency

An item may sit in the backlog for 3 weeks before being started. Lead time = 3 weeks + cycle time. Cycle time alone doesn't tell you how long the customer waited — it only measures once development is underway. To answer the manager's question: improving cycle time is good, but reducing lead time is what customers actually feel.

3 / 5

At the team's weekly metrics review, the tech lead says:

"In the past two weeks, the team closed 11 work items: 8 user stories and 3 bug fixes."

Which Kanban flow metric is the tech lead reporting?

Throughput is the number of work items a team completes per unit of time. It is Kanban's primary output metric and counts items regardless of their size or complexity:

Metric	Unit	What it tells you
Throughput	Items per week / sprint	How much work exits the system per time period
Velocity	Story points per sprint	Scrum-specific; not directly equal to item count
Cycle time	Days per item (average)	How quickly individual items flow through

Throughput is particularly useful for forecasting: based on 11 items per 2-week period, the team can project how many items they'll complete over the next quarter. Throughput does not require estimation — it is pure observation of completed work.

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The team reviews their Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD) in the weekly metrics meeting. They notice that the "In Progress" band has been widening steadily over the past week while the "Done" band barely grew.

What does this pattern most likely indicate?

In a CFD, a widening band in any column indicates that work is accumulating there faster than it is flowing out — a classic bottleneck signal:

CFD pattern	Meaning	Action
In Progress band widens	Incoming rate exceeds completion rate	Reduce WIP; identify and clear blockers
Review band widens	Reviews are backing up (not enough reviewers)	Pull reviewers from other tasks; limit review WIP
All bands stable, slopes parallel	Healthy, predictable flow	Maintain current practices

The widening "In Progress" band combined with a flat "Done" band is a warning sign that items are being started at a rate the team cannot sustain. The correct response is to stop starting new work and focus on completing what is already in progress.

5 / 5

Your team's Kanban board has a red horizontal lane at the top, spanning all columns above the regular rows. The team lead explains: "This is our expedite lane — only use it if absolutely necessary."

What is the correct purpose of this expedite swimlane?

An expedite lane (also called a "red lane" or "fast lane") is a special swimlane reserved for items that genuinely cannot wait for normal flow — typically production incidents, regulatory requirements, or critical customer-facing bugs:

Expedite lane characteristic	Why it matters
WIP limit of 1	Prevents the fast lane from becoming a dumping ground for anything "urgent"
Bypasses normal queue order	Ensures critical items flow to Done without waiting behind lower-priority work
Restricted entry criteria	Only items meeting a clear definition (e.g. P0 production bug) may enter the lane

The key phrase "use it only if absolutely necessary" is intentional — overuse of the expedite lane breaks normal flow and undermines the predictability the Kanban system provides. Blocked items (Option C) are typically shown with a blocker icon on their card, not moved to a separate lane.