LeanKit Kanban

This week I've been working with the LeanKit Kanban, a very interesting approach for using Kanban boards in Agile development. All of you know about my interests with the Agile approach, and I think that this interesting and free (limited) tool will help you to keep track of your daily work.

Here you can see a mock up of my kanban board:


In the Jesse Liberty blog, you can find a very interesting description of the Kanban tool:

What Kanban Does For You

What is not obvious in looking at the board is how quickly it reveals bottlenecks, where I’m wasting time, and how to be as effective as possible.  The fact that it is all very visual, that you are moving these cards around and can see at a glance all the relevant information, makes it very easy to see what is stuck, and what is moving nicely.

LeanKit Kanban has a number of features that I don’t personally use, but would have killed for in previous projects, such as advanced analytics that include diagrams for Cycle time, cumulative flow, process efficiency, work distribution and more.  The analytics allow a team to answer such critical questions  as “what is holding the project back?” and ”when will this item be ready?” with high confidence.

I do use the notification capabilities, which turns what is usually a “polling” exercise in frustration into an “interrupt-driven” management approach; much better.

The bottom line, for me, though, is that each “card” carries its entire history, its description, its priority, its due date and everything else I need to know about a sub-feature.  That is very clean and it fits well with the way I work.
Jesse Liberty.

Comments

  1. What's the technology of LeanKit Kanban?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi,

    you mean the programming language? I think it's programmed in Ruby. If you want to interact with it trough C#, you can use the Kanban API, that follows REST principles and it's simple and easy to use, and make use of JSON and XML (with emphasis on JSON).

    ReplyDelete
  3. Can this be used in VB 6?

    I'm using the code:

    Dim WinHttpReq As WinHttp.WinHttpRequest
    Set WinHttpReq = New WinHttpRequest
    WinHttpReq.Open "GET", "http://mypage.leankitkanban.com/Kanban/Api/Board/15308269/GetBoardIdentifiers);", False 'assembles the http request
    WinHttpReq.SetCredentials "username", "password", HTTPREQUEST_SETCREDENTIALS_FOR_SERVER
    WinHttpReq.Send ' sends the http request
    lblStatus = WinHttpReq.Status & " - " & WinHttpReq.StatusText ' puts the status into lblStatus
    Range("A1").Value = WinHttpReq.ResponseText 'puts the HTTP proxies from the URL into txtProxy.Text

    But I getting the error page: "Looks like we are having some technical difficulties and couldn't process your last request."

    Is there something amiss?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Cptn,

    Could it be that you don't have permissions to do that?

    ReplyDelete

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