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#

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/

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