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Tuesday, January 24, 2012

My Own Kanban-Tool Shootout

What's your favorite Kanban board? Of course a physical wall with Post-its or index cards.

Unfortunately I am asked for having an electronically version for my colleagues on the other side of the ocean, and I realize its a little bit easer to let a tool track the cycle time. I was simply to lazy or whatsoever to track over several weeks consistently the cycle times for all the stuff we delivered.

The combatants
So, I am looking for a tool and there are actually quite a lot of candidates. The most promising ones are:
What are my requirements? 
Must have's are

  • items of different type, visualized with a specific color for every item
  • drag-nd-drop
  • Charts for Cycle Time
  • CFD = cumulative flow diagram
  • API access to move items programmatically, and maybe to create some

Nice to have would be:

  • marking blocked items
  • tracking of the total time of items being blocked
  • change the history of an item (in case of missing updates)
  • iPad client with online editing
  • iPad client with offline editing



Post-its!

The following happend last week in a workshop covering a software tool for Agile development.

The trainer asked: 
What is your favorite Agile project management tool?
Actually he thought about Mingle, and expected JIRA to be the answer.

Stuart answered:
Post-its!
The trainer:
Ah, is there any electronically version of the Post-its? 
Alex and Stuart:
Pictures of Post-its!