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Comment by qznc | Hacker News Reader

I have yet to understand where this kanban board stuff makes sense. Apparently, the Agile philosophy [0] introduced this to the software development world. Most implementations (Gitlab, Wekan) seem to miss central features (limits, cycle time stats).

I guess those boards serve as a issue tracker extension for short term development? How does that improve the process? Why do you need that on top of an issue tracker? Replacing the issue tracker is probably not idea?

[0] https://www.atlassian.com/agile/kanban

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I work at a small IT company that does website development for small businesses around the city. Our projects usually last around 1 to 4 months. We use JetBrains YouTrack with all open projects showing on one big board.

Each week we meet with project owners (somebody at the client company). They give us a list of tasks they want completed this week and we go over tasks we finished last week.

After the project is done, we move to only working on one-off issues they send. Usually bugs or small new feature requests. A simple issue tracker would work fine here, but we still have weekly meeting with our boss to show that we actually did work last week.

We already use self-hosted GitLab for our code, so I want to try out this new board feature to see if it meets our needs.

The visualization and instant-modification of kanban boards is really appealing from a task/issue management perspective. It shouldn't replace issue tracking, it can serve as a frontend to portions of it.

And prioritization, Cards get ordered by priority instead of 100 items all market "urgent, fix yesterday".

It complements the existing issue tracker, the issues and the labels are the same. You can use issues without the board but it might be useful to give a visual overview. In meetings it is frequently easier to use a board see the many issue at a glance and to drag and drop them.

I'm not sure we want to have the software enforce limits, but I do agree that you don't want any list/column to become too long.

Cycle time analytics are planned in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/20975

I think it would useful if the admin could opt-in to have limits enforced. That is a central tenet of kanban methodology. While the default could be no limit, I don't see why self-limiting should be prevented. I can open an issue if you like. :)

Please do open an issue, thanks.

Done https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/21325

The Gitlab version isn't a kanban board specifically, though they say it can be visually like one (its a more general thing and, as you note, it doesn't have the specific additional features that would make it usable as an automated kanban system, so you'd have to manually enforce process controls and collect data to really get what you'd want out of a kanban board.) I'd think of it more as a customizable dashboard view over the issue list (it doesn't replace the issue list, since its strictly drawn from it.)

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