QBRANCH:CODE

2010-01-23

New Mailing List for Qanban

Leonard Axelsson | mailinglist, qanban

Got any feedback or questions regarding Qanban? Post at qanban-users and we'll get back to you.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

/The Qanban Team

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2010-01-13

The Qanban Installer

Mattias Mirhagen | development, grails, groovy, kanban, qanban

Since the development of the Qanban standalone, I started to take a look on taking it to it's next step; a Qanban Installer. Using IzPack I hacked an installation script, installing Qanban on your computer, with the posibility to add items to the start menu. Now all you have to do to run your local standalone Qanban is by going to Qanban in the start menu and click on Qanban->Qanban.

IzPack

As stated on the IzPack website, "IzPack is a one-stop solution for packaging, distributing and deploying applications. It's fully cross-platform and generates a single installer." It's fairly simple to use, and I can really recommend it.

Easier Qanban Install

When running the installer.jar a wizard will take you through the installation process. In this installation you will be able to set standard port and the amount of memory you wish to give to Qanban (port 8080 and 512mb memory is standard).

This will give you a menu item to launch Qanban and Uninstall Qanban. Now it will be even easier to install and run Qanban!

The Installer isn't complete, and therefore there is no release, but quite soon I hope for a first release.

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2009-12-18

Qanban 0.1 Released!

Leonard Axelsson | development, grails, groovy, kanban, qanban

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.

Open Source

Qanban has been open from the get go but a while back we got round to adding the license terms (Apache V2). Feel free to browse the sourcecode and file bugs on our github repo. In closing, thanks to Mattias and Patrik for doing a great job.

Download: qanban-0.1.war

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2009-11-23

Four weeks of QANBAN

Leonard Axelsson | development, grails, kanban, qanban

In the mirror

We’re heading into the fifth week of development and if all goes well we’ll start using QANBAN internally next week. Things have gone smoothly most of the time, got stuck on a couple of features and spent a lot more time than expected on UI/AJAX (github claims our project is a JavaScript project).

New Features

Workflow when moving a card

One of the new features since the last report is a workflow where you get a dialog when moving a card to a new phase. You can change assignee or verify that you wanna be set as assignee for the card (by hitting enter or Ok). The assignee shows in the dialog as a profile picture from Gravatar. We’re planning to add commenting to this dialog as well.

Move card

Split into user & admin actions

As it stands right now you need the admin role to do the following:

Add cards
Add Phases
Modify a phase

Add Cards is something I see the "users" doing at some companies, but in that case maybe all of them should be admins? This might be configurable if the need arises.

Hard rules

When digitalizing a business process there is two extremes when it comes to how you implement business rules. At one end all rules are set in stone and tool enforce them to 100%, at the other end you can do whatever you like and are expected to know how to use the process. When designing QANBAN we took a road that leans towards the “set in stone”-direction, something I’ve come to question the last couple of days. In practice it means that you can only move cards forward, not backward and you can’t pull a card into a phase where the limit is reached. I did a presentation on Kanban last friday (at FindOut Technologies) and one of the things we discussed was that it would probably be more useful to clearly mark a phase where the limit has been reached, but allow it the move itself. If you have any thoughts about the implementation of rules I’d appreciate comments and/or emails (@ leonard dot axelsson at qbranch dot se).

Tracking changes

We spent a lot of time discussing how to implement change tracking in a way that allows for good analysis later. We've choosen to implement changes as change events (see: Event Sourcing) which means that we keep a record of all changes (roughly like a VCS do with diffs). In the long term that means we should be able to implement good workflow analysis and even playback functionality so that you could see the history of the application played out before your eyes. Right now only card moves are tracked.

Changelog

Live for internal usage next week

Integrating with Active Directory is really important for our internal usage and that is what our developers will be focusing on this week. As long as we get that feature down we’ll start using it instead of our analog Kanban wall. Other than that they’ll be adding small things such as:

editing cards
changing the order of phases
restyling of cards with description visible on the board
clear indication of the logged in users cards

We're getting closer and closer to a usable product and would appreciate your suggestions and feedback. Send me an email (leonard dot axelsson at qbranch dot se) if you're interested in testing it and I'll see about packaging an alpha-version.

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2009-11-02

Qanban, one week into development

Leonard Axelsson | grails, kanban, opensource, project, qanban

Mission Statement

Our focus is to develop an application simple enough that your grandma could use it (given that she know a little bit about Kanban). We might add “power-features” somewhere along the line but they should neither scare away new users (because of high learning curve) nor be needed to use the application. The admin might need a manual, not the users.

Need

We (Qbranch) work with sourcing and a bunch of us do customer work tied to it. One day it might be updating a shell-script, another day we do Tomcat configurations or JVM performance tuning. We started using Kanban to organize our work a while

back and put up “Cards” on one of our office walls. Honestly it haven’t been as helpful as we would have liked, we’re consultants and it’s a rare day when all of us are gathered at the office. As you’ve probably already guessed we think a digital “Kanban Wall” might be just the thing we need and with the help of 2 trainees from C3L:s “Systemutveckling med Java” we’ve just finished the first sprint.

Story so far

Status after the first week is 3 user stories done (1 unfinished) and a retrospective where we discussed the need for a clear “definition of done” as well as the importance of TDD.

Sprint 1

- Project setup

- Auth with AD (basic auth is done)

- Adding new Cards (tasks)

- Reorganization of cards using drag and drop

Heading into the unknown

During sprint 2 we’ll continue adding basic features such as moving a card from one phase to the next and tracking changes (possibly using event sourcing). Our underlying theme for the sprint will be “getting things right”, both in the view (ui, i18n) and in the backend (rest, tdd, refactoring).

Roadmap

- RSS for the

backlog

- Permalinks to the cards

- Restifying all of the POGOs

- Even better UI

- Filtering the view

Need I say more?

We’ve chosen Grails as our development platform, in my opinion it supports both high quality and a quick pace. On top of that we use the Spring Security and jQuery plugins, a list that surely will grow in time. Furthermore the project will be Open Sourced ASAP (pending license selection, probably Apache V2).

If you’re interested you can find the code in our repo on github @ http://github.com/qbranchcode/Qanban

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