Kanboard – Kanban Project Management Software | Hacker News Reader

Kanboard – Kanban Project Management Software

kanboard.org

136 pointsBerislavLopac34 comments

Fun fact: The way kanban is used in project management is different than the original kanban used in manufacturing plants. In "IRL" kanban cards are handed _backwards_ to the previous station to signal demand, so things don't get worked on, unless they are needed downstream.

Lean kanban was never meant for project management, it is a process management and demand leveling technique.

Agile card boards like this bear little resemblance to Kanban, but the name caught on with the original Kanban software book. It is still a decent book though, and does in fact cover many of the principles of lean kanban. That said, I've rarely met a team using a kanban board that is familiar with the book or the principles of kanban.

https://www.amazon.ca/Kanban-Successful-Evolutionary-Technol...

I would say a large number of people also understood it from The Phoenix Project.

Suddenly things make sense... I would look at a pile of (virtual) cards in a spot and wonder why there was a pile of cards when a goal was not too have a pileup.

The non-kanbanness of software project boards is the lack of limits or limits applied to the wrong resource. E.g. the number of items of in-progress or in-review should be limited to the number of developers who perform these actions. Setting a column limit irrespective of this doesn't make sense. Also shouldn't have N cards assigned to one person and none assigned to N-1 others. In short column/state != limited resource.

Yep, but it's logically the same. The Todo/Ready pile is the "demand" that is waiting to be fulfilled, and the worker "pulls" a new card from the ToDo/Ready pile, rather than "pull" a part to assemble a car. If anyone is using Kanban for tech work and hasn't read the wiki page, the concepts behind Kanban are far more important than the actual process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban

The idea of Scrum Sprints applied to this has always seemed ridiculous to me. Scrum Sprints box the time for a given set of work ("We're going to get these 3 items done in a sprint") rather than just dynamically allocate work in a steady stream. In Kanban, you just take work and execute it as it appears for you, and it gets done when it gets done. They don't make one car a day, they make a dynamically shifting amount of cars per day, as needed. (Incidentally, I just found this adorable Toyota Production Children's Questions page https://www.toyota.co.jp/en/kids/faq/b/01/)

Scrum sprints limit work in progress just like kanban. It's just that with kanban you can set more granular WIP limits. I wrote about this here: https://andreschweighofer.com/agile/kanban-as-an-evolution-o...

We use this software extensively at my place of employment and have done so for a few years. In fact, apart from ad-hoc spreadsheets with pretty coloured rows to make pseudo Gantt charts and the software developers using Gitlab issues, this is the only project/task management tool we use.

In short, it's quite good. It hasn't all been smooth sailing, but generally it's a solid piece of software which doesn't crash very often at all. The default design leaves a lot to be desired, but that can be easily fixed with CSS tweaks. Also, the performance can be very, very poor if there are a lot of cards open at once. The best process is to make sure any completed task is not just moved to a "Finished" column, but is actually Closed, so it no longer shows on the board. The Gantt chart (via a plugin, which used to be part of the core software) is a bit clunky. Exporting reports for management is also poor. Only a raw CSV export is available. There's also no actively developed mobile client. Overall though, I'm pretty happy with it for work projects, but don't use it for my personal stuff.

Sooo... the design is not good, performance is very very poor, plugins are clunky, reporting is also poor, there's no mobile client ..... but you're happy with it. Hmmh, alright.

Yes. I could have listed all the good points, but didn't apart from stability. The negatives are only such if they're important to you.

If you don't have more than 50 cards visible, no problem. If you don't need a good Gantt chart, no problem. If you don't need fancy report exporting, no problem. If you don't need a mobile client, no problem. If you can write a little CSS to make it look prettier, no problem.

If you want a nice, solid standalone kanban tool with a bunch of other nice features, this could be your best solution. I've tried many of these - Wekan, Restya etc and so far, as a standalone board, Kanboard fits my requirements best.

My previous comment feels snarky, did not mean it to be so. I apologize.

This looks lovely for a self hosted Kanban board. Of course there are _lots_ of paid products out there for this too, but there are a lot of times where my company would prefer something free and self hosted.

Slightly unrelated: It looks like the author is the same as the self-hosted RSS reader Miniflux which I've been using for 4-6 months now and has been fantastic (Miniflux is linked in the footer and the primary committer is the same on both repos).

A fork of Kanboard with metrics, productivity and "workflow" management is https://www.businessday.io/

Our accounting team found it useful to keep their team on track. Oddly I wound up using for all things personal related.

Only complaints are barrier to entry is high and plugins aren't yet supported.

I like the idea. It looks like something that could work for me.

Minor rant.

I dislike the install section. It just assumes I already know everything about how to do it. I ran into similar issues when I was trying to setup Kimai. Install instructions basically forced me to spend time hunting down howtos, resolving issues that came up during my attempt ( arrgh ), and later just throw my hands in the air as Kimai installer told me PHP version is too old ( tried XAAMP and WAMP ).

I get that everyone's setup is different. I do. I just think a little more information in that section would be helpful.

When it comes to installing stuff like this, Docker is your friend.

I love how much stupid single-project-or-service-specific deployment crap Docker has saved me from having to (re-)learn. The way it tends to encourage easier and better-documented configuration than the software packaged in it usually has is a huge bonus, too. My Samba config is a couple command line args per share, now. So much better than "OK, where does this distro store its Samba configs? Is it overridden by files anywhere else? Is this a real user or a 'Samba user' intended here? How do I add those again? Which section does this line go in?'

It tends to do similar things for backups. You know what you need to back up because it's explicitly mapped to a directory or disk outside the Docker image. If you failed to map something you want to back up you'll notice immediately because whatever-it-is doesn't come back after destroying and re-creating the container. No hunting through /var or /opt or whatever. Once it's working just back up whatever's in those mapped resources.

I can say without a doubt that I’ve tried a lot more software since Docker came on the scene. I don’t use node or php, and so installing anything that uses one of those was guaranteed to be hours of debugging something’s install when I just want to try it out. The only software I’ll try that isn’t packaged in a container is Go binaries. They’re the only thing that comes close to that (but only if there are no other dependencies).

There's a separate requirements section that's linked to at the start of the installation section. I think instructions for things like configuring a web server would be too granular. In this case, the concise installation section combined with the requirements section seems like just enough info.

Love this software, I am a manager at my job and I missed having a kanban board for my day to day work. With this software I am able to organize my tasks, write notes about them, and move them through a workflow I was comfortable with as a developer. I also can keep related documents and links to issues so I have all the information I need in one place.

Much more robust alternative to Wekan, switched from Wekan to Kanboard almost a year ago.

We used Kanboard at my current job until recently. It works, but has a very MVP feel. We basically used it as an improved TODO list. The UI is barely usable, and it is missing a lot of bells and whistles around notification, text editing, cross-referencing, organizing issues, and such. JIRA (to which we recently migrated) feels like space-age technology compared to kanboard.

Initial impressions, I ran: `docker run -d --name kanboard -p 80:80 -t kanboard/kanboard:v1.2.8`

Then

`docker logs kanboard`

But I can't figure out how to log in. Maybe you should print the default login username and randomized password to std output when starting with docker?

Edit Apparently this is not Show HN, so I'm not sure who am I talking to.

Have you tried admin/admin which is the default for the standard install? [0]

[0] - https://docs.kanboard.org/en/latest/admin_guide/installation...

I initially couldn't find it either as I jumped straight to the running with docker section.

Took a wild guess it was admin/admin and got lucky.

I use this at home as my personal task manager for household jobs. My wife had access too and lines up things for us we need to do etc. Works well. We also use it at my work for projects. A great bit of free software

I like the simple implementation. Jira is ubiquitous but has gotten really heavy over the last few years and moving through is really clunky. So I think I'll try this out the next chance I get.

I discovered kanboard after several years working as a scrum master. Simple, robust, flexible and free is a good combination. I use kanboard every day for both personal and work.

Love this project. I run two different ones and find this project easy to use and maintain. Subtasks are particularly useful for our workflow.

i love how simple it is. i use it on the cheapest vps and its fast and enough flexible.

the only thing im missing is the limited reporting ability to export my timesheets. all tasks have to have subtasks to be able to track time. i use it for freelancing projects.

which VPS do you use for this?

$5 digitalocean

I love how Kanban makes the tasks easier to track!

Any use this with Jira? Do you recommend?

Looks like it's meant to be a substitute for Jira rather than an integration.

On this general topic, I've been pretty impressed with Phabricator as a good JIRA alternative (with gitlab features as well). It was made at Facebook and then open sourced and then I think the team left Facebook(?). Anyway it's blazing fast and has a pretty solid kanban. It kind of seems like a one-person team though on the dev side.

https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/

We started using it long ago because it was one of the really nice looking self-hosted git repo hosts with very nice code review.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com