Introduction (updated)

Qanban is a digital, multi-user Kanban-board. It's a tool to aid you when using the Agile Process Kanban.

The team here at Qanban Headquarters^TM are happy to present Qanban 0.1 to you! It might be a small step for the world but a big step for us.

Lately we've been focusing on squashing bugs, testing, squashing more bugs and one final feature: standalone Qanban. The 0.1 version can be run directly from commandline and uses embedded Jetty and HSQLDB.

Kanban

This section takes for granted that you have some understanding of how Scrum works.

Kanban is used to visualize your workflow with the help of cards that are moved trough workflow states on a board, very much like in Scrum. Your work in progress is limited by workflow state which means you agree on how many tasks can be in WIP at any one time. In Kanban there are no sprints, instead you use the state limits to control the flow and minimalize lead time. Finally in Kanban your Backlog order is used to set priority and the engineers pull cards form the top of the Backlog when they are ready.

Kanban gives you the tools to visualize your workflow and minimize lead time and that's why we at Qbranch use it. Read more about our reasons for using Kanban here.

That was a very short introduction to Kanban for more information, check out this excellent guide.

Features

• Creating and managing cards and phases
• User and Admin Roles (in 0.1 all users are created as Admin)
• Drag-n-drop for pulling cards through the workflow
• Change log
• Archive for finished cards
• Gravatar integration for user portraits
• Rearrangement of phases
• Standalone mode
• Autorefresh
• Offline/session timeout warning

It's early days for Qanban but the featureset is broad enough that we hope for some external usage. Most basic features are there, what we miss are things like statistics, user management and an option if you'd like to have hard or soft rules (currently they are hard). We'd love to hear from you about how you use Kanban!

Running Qanban Standalone

The only thing you need to run Qanban is Java 1.6. Run the command below on the commandline and point your browser to http://localhost:8080/ and you should be greeted by a login screen. After that you'll have to create a user and then you're good to go.

java -Xmx512m -jar qanban-0.1.war

Running Qanban standalone creates files for the database and log in the folder where you ran the command.

How does it work?

We use an embedded Jetty and HSQLDB to get the standalone version working. It's recommended to give the JVM at least 512mb of ram, Grails is hungry. Ofcourse qanban-0.1.war is a normal war file and you can use it with your servlet container of choice as you would with any war.