How we chose our Kanban Tool
March 9, 2013
Update: We moved to Trello
We looked at Trello also initially, but didn't consider as it does not provide features such as WIP limit, cycle and lead time reporting etc. There are extensions available for the same such as Trello WIP Limits for adding WIP limit, but felt those may not be sufficient. But recently we moved to Trello mainly because of its
Simplicity and Low learning curve and we are right now very happy with the move.
Here's our original evaluation:**
We’ve been using Pivotal Tracker[PT] as our Collaborative Project Management Tool for over 2 years now.
Recently though, we chose to move toward a Kanban style of workflow. PT is however heavily geared toward an iterative form of development - but we’ve now chosen to eschew iterations altogether. We’ve been doing continuous deployment for a while now, and we found the whole process of estimations and sizing of stories a largely wasteful exercise.
I am not going to talk about “Why Kanban”, because there are many articles and books which talks about the same. But I am instead going to walk you through the process that we used to evaluate and decide upon the online Kanban tool that we finally ended up shifting to.
The different tools we evaluated were:
If you’ve ever used PT, you already know what an awesome piece of software it is. The real-time collaboration features, the sheer fluidity of the user interface, the way it all tightly fits together - is amazing. So, our expectations from the Kanban tool were already fairly high - especially in terms of a clutter free, fluid, “don’t-get-in-my-way” user experience.
So, we came up with a list of criteria for deciding our tool of choice.
Here is the original google spreadsheet. So which tool did we end up choosing? Well, its a Kanban Tool called KanbanTool :)
Lastly, I would like to mention those articles which helped us to understand Kanban better.
- Kanban Development OverSimplified by Jeff Patton
- Single Piece Workflow in Kanban by James Shore and Arloo Banshee
- Kanban by Henrik Kniberg