Kanban is a scheduling system and thanks to it you can easily monitor your team’s workflow. It tells you what should be done, when and by whom. In software development it is a board with a number of placeholders for work to be done. You and your team create separate tasks and place them on it. When the task is completed, you just relocate it to the “done” column.
Among the main advantages of Kanban boards are their simplicity and visualization of the working process. You and your team always know what others team’s members do just now without asking them about it.
A lot of teams use ordinary whiteboards with stickers as Kanban boards. It really works, but not in case of distributed teams, when members are located in different offices, cities or even countries. One more point against ordinary whiteboards, is that it is not convenient to use it when your team is more than 5 members, as you should have several boards to place all the tasks. Moreover, you should take a photo of the each status’s change of the tasks to analyze the team’s workflow.
That is why the automated Kanban boards have appeared. Today there are quite a lot of such tools. All of them have their pros and cons.
We have tried the most widespread and brand new ones and in this article would like to talk about our choice for today – Kanban Tool by Shore Labs. We have successfully implemented it in our company.
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For each Scrum master and for the whole agile team the most important is the done selected backlogs for the sprint, but not time spent on coffee breaks or browsing the internet. And it’s the known fact, that in agile development the most essential issue is how much time is left to finish the user story, but not how much time was spent by each of the developer.
