Kanban Web-Based Tools Evaluation
This page has a review of the tools that are under evaluation for use in Launchpad.
For each of the tools, I put current Launchpad team data in and recorded both how that process when as well as whether I thought the tool was adequate for the job.
Finally, there's a section on API. We'll want a web-based API to these tools so we can integrate them into Launchpad data, at the very least.
LeanKit Kanban
Here are my findings:
- General Comments:
- There appears to be at least 3 people working on this tool:
- Chris Hefley, President and Founder
- Stephen Franklin, VP of Operations and Founder
- Daniel Norton, VP of User Experience and Founder
- Tool quality is there. Everything works as it seems it should.
Found API docs here: http://wiki.leankitkanban.com/KanbanAPI.ashx
- Ouch, C#
- There appears to be at least 3 people working on this tool:
1. LeanKit Kanban - Company site: http://www.leankitkanban.com
- Created boards (only 1 for free)
- Created lanes for work flow
Can move lanes via <-> icon on top-left corner of the lane (in edit mode).
- Found a horizontal "split" feature. TBD: use that for horizontal swim lanes
- Added tasks - input dialog is sufficient for this
- Called all WIP items "features"
- Put all features into Backlog (as an experiment)
- Found the only way to move items (edit) out of backlog is drag-and-drop.
This issue is being worked on by LeanKit folks.
- The work-around is that you drag to first lane, which works to then drag further.
- NOTE: I could have set the initial lane in the Item input dialog.
- Edited tasks unto board - reasonable process
- Cannot make the backlog widget any smaller.
- UI is too big for a single browser w/o scrolling (even on large H/R display)
- There is a Zooming feature, which I didn't try yet.
- Created horizontal swim lanes for projects.
- This quickly takes up the screen real estate.
- I left the one set of swim lanes in the "Analyze" lane, for show.
- You can see that it runs off the bottom of the screen, and I've only got 3 teams so far.
- Should put developer names on cards, but that would require more users.
- API: Copied the C# API example.
- TBD: Need to spend some time reading code
And here's a full-size image of the generated page I made.
http://people.canonical.com/~fromme/launchpad/images/leankit-lp1001-full.png
Update
As Launchpad is an open-source project, we have been granted more boards and users. This will help in your evaluation, but isn't enough to cover our large project size out of the box.
Zen
- General Comments:
- There appears to be 2 people working on this tool:
Nate Kohari, President and CTO - http://kohari.org/
Nicole Kohari, VP of Operations and Founder - http://nikibeth.com/
- Tool quality is there. Everything works as it seems it should.
Found API info here: http://blog.agilezen.com/2009/08/03/introducing-the-zen-api/
- There appears to be 2 people working on this tool:
1. Zen - Company site: http://www.agilezen.com/
- Created boards (only 1 project board for free)
- Created lanes for work flow
- Since there is a "Ready" attribute of a WIP card, didn't need to create a "Ready" lane.
- It is possible we will want Ready lanes, but screen real estate is an issue.
- Arranging lanes once they are define is done by drag-and-drop.
- Could not find a way to do horizontal swim lanes
- On the other hand, color-coding of WIP cards was easy, so color-per-team was my choice
- Added tasks - input dialog is sufficient for this
- Called all WIP items "features"
- Put most features into Backlog (as an experiment)
- Moving items (edit) out of backlog is done either via drag-and-drop or editing each card.
- The card edit feature is nice. Easy to go from a Board to a Full-"screen" card edit form.
- NOTE: I also could have set the initial lane in the Item input form.
- Edited tasks unto board - reasonable process
- Cannot put developer names on cards, because only 1 user is allowed.
- API:
- TBD
And here's an full-size image of the generated page I made.
http://people.canonical.com/~fromme/launchpad/images/zen-lp1001-full.png
Other Web-Based Tools
Here are a list of Kanban web-based tools.
- Digaboard
- flow.io
- Jira 4.0 plus Greenhopper plugin
- Kanbanery
- Qanban
- Rally 2009.5 plus Kanban Mashup (video)
- Silver Catalyst
- Target Process
- Trichord
- Version One