This is another idea for an open source project. Quite simply it’s a web app that allows you to manage a kanban board.
Kanwhat?
If you were around for Claudio’s presentation on 15th of September past, you already know what kanban is (at least as much as I do anyway 
). For those that weren’t there, kanban is basically a mechanism that limits work in progress. Rather than time boxed iterations where you work on a batch of stories, in kanban stories are pulled through the system when there is capacity and (ideally) deployed when finished. This means that you can identify and eliminate bottlenecks early and provide more value to your customer.
Why?
I think this could be a nice project for us for a few reasons:
- It’s useful. I think this has potential to help a lot of people in the group with their day to day development efforts.
- It’s simple but with scope for growth. It should be fairly easy to get something useful up and running but I think there is also a lot of potential for spin off / supporting projects (Surface planning app anyone? I’m sure Martha could secure us some hardware for testing
). - We have a very good customer in Claudio who is able to provide the knowledge of Kanban and how it should be applied.
So what would it look like?
Initially I see this being a fairly straightforward web app displaying a kanban board and allowing users to add stories and pull them through the system. I think we could then start to add lots of useful features for notifying, measuring lead/cycle time, identifying bottleneck, etc. I’d also like to see a nice rest api and possibly a rich client.
The competition
There are a few products out there already that provide kanban boards. None that I’m aware of are open source.
Further reading
http://www.limitedwipsociety.org
http://blog.crisp.se/henrikkniberg/2009/06/26/1246053060000.html
What say you?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
One Comment
Sounds like an interesting idea. The big question I would have is that is it really applicable to have a web application to represent the kanban board? There are some similar tools e.g. http://scrumy.com/ for scrum but I would question the validity/usefulness of these tools!
Is Kanban “hands on” where all members of the team meet daily physically around a board and update the board (a.k.a. standup meetings…)? – I don’t know but maybe Claudio could give his opinion on this?
Due to the nature of the project you could include some concepts/beliefs that interest us all like DDD, TDD, ORMs, IOC, SOLID, MVC etc