Ask HN: Kanban – which tools with success? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Kanban – which tools with success?

3 pointsbsg756 comments

We are using Jira for development planning (an unfortunately not current version - no upgrade plan in sight) and need something better to manage the herd of development priorities. In my past, a Kanban like approach (LeanKit) worked well, both to slot activities, and and highlight the effects of context switching.

What are HN'ers using in this area and have found success with? I would prefer to use a premise hosted system, but it seems like they are few and far between, with the majority being hosted.

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I don't really follow any dogmatic Agile[0] practices such as Scrum or Kanban, but for the last two or so years I've exclusively used Trello[1]. It is lightweight enough that it isn't in my way. I more or less treat it as an online persisted post-it note wall.

0 - http://rubiquity.com/2014/03/12/agile-is-dead-angry-develope...

1 - https://trello.com/

For my team Pivotal [http://www.pivotaltracker.com/] was the solution. After first iteration 'he' know how much we can do in another (fixed period). Our responsibility is set difficult level to each task. They have tags which help us collect issues and epics. I'm not connected with them different than payment for service. I'm just happy user.

I've been developing a tool called Catalist that has Kanban-like functionality built right into all our checklists since each item has states of to do, doing, and done. If you need more states (i.e. more steps beyond 3 like Trello), we offer pipelines that do just that. We believe having both these systems in our product allows our customers to speak a common language when it comes to priorities. We would definitely be open to allowing you to host Catalist directly on premises. Happy to give a demo, all you need to do is sign up and I'll contact you.

Catalist [http://www.catalist.me]

We use JIRA at my current company with all the agile plugins to run both scrum and kanban projects.

To be honest, I've still found the most successful tools to be a big wall/window/whiteboard with physical cards. I'd still go down this route if my team wasn't globally distributed as it's just easier to work planning backlogs, sprints as well as doing daily standups.

We at day5labs.com are believers of physical kanban board as well so much that we've made product: http://bit.ly/1uPOtlE

We use our own product FeatureMap [https://www.featuremap.co] to define the scope and track the progress of, well, FeatureMap. :) It's more oriented towards Story Mapping than towards Kanban but you certainly can manage Scrum/Kanban boards with it.

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