How professional teams organise their work: Scrum, Kanban boards, and the toolchain from ticket to merged code. Press play on any sketch to watch it happen.
1 Scrum
Scrum organises work into short fixed cycles called sprints, usually two weeks. Each sprint delivers something usable, so the team gets real feedback often.
Product Owner: decides what matters most.
Scrum Master: helps the team and removes blockers.
Developers: decide how to do the work, and do it.
Events: sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review, and retrospective.
Cycle diagram
1/5 The Product Owner keeps the backlog in priority order.
Rule of thumb: The retrospective is the most valuable meeting. It is how a team gets better.
2 Kanban and tracking work
Kanban makes work visible on a board and limits how much is in progress at once. Finishing things beats starting things. Tools such as Jira, Trello and GitHub Projects all work this way.
Board: a column for each stage of the work.
WIP limit: a cap on items in a column, which exposes bottlenecks.
Pull, not push: take new work only when there is room.
Cycle time: how long an item takes from start to done.
Kanban board
1/5 You pull a card into Doing. The limit here is 2.
Rule of thumb: Stop starting and start finishing. Ten half-done items deliver nothing.
3 The team toolchain
Modern teams connect their tools so that work flows from a ticket to merged code with little manual effort, and every change can be traced back to why it was made.
Issue tracker: each piece of work has a ticket with a clear goal.
Branch and pull request: link code to its ticket and review it.
Code review: catches bugs and spreads knowledge across the team.
Definition of done: an agreed list, such as tested, reviewed and documented.
Process diagram
1/5 Everything starts from a ticket that explains why the work matters.
Rule of thumb: Review small pull requests. Nobody reviews 2,000 lines carefully.
