Design and its fit in the kanban development methodology

How does design fit into the kanban method. Should there be a dedicated column for design to be placed in, or is the high & low level design of the story开发者_开发知识库 done before it even moves from the story queue into the WIP?

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There is no single answer. It all depends how a team works. What you basically do with Kanban board is you map the way you work into the board. It means the answer to your question is within the process you follow when you build software.

To help you a bit - according to rules you should follow when you work with Kanban:

• You should visualize workflow, which means all stages which are somehow separate in real life should be visualized in such way on the board.

• Your policies should be explicit, which means everyone in the team should understand the process the same. If a sticky note is in a specific column it should mean that a feature is in such and such state and it should be obvious for everyone in the team.

Additionally, it is a typical situation that separate column is introduced when you deal with handoffs, meaning a feature is handed off from one team member to another, e.g. separate columns for development (done by developer) and testing (done by quality engineer).

When talking about design I've seen different approaches: either a single separate column for whole design, more columns when design is kind of extensive or no dedicated column at all when design is merged/mixed with development. Ask yourself, and your team, how it looks like in your case and you will have the answer how the board should look like.

And one final advice: don't be afraid of experimenting. If you aren't sure how you work, which is possible, try different things and check which board design works best in you case.