Announcing MantisHub’s new Kanban plugin! Just released and exclusive to MantisHub, the Kanban plugin is a highly requested feature bringing another Agile feature to the MantisHub toolset.
Kanban may have been born in the auto industry but in the 21st century, it’s spread into many industries for project management and has most ardently been adopted in software development as a significant tool within Agile development frameworks.
The reason that Kanban has become so popular is many faceted but mainly, it has proven valuable in making teams more efficient with faster delivery of updates. So what is Kanban? Well, the principle of Kanban is for teams to place tasks on a visual ‘board’, grouped into columns reflecting workflow statuses. A very basic board will have at the least ‘To Do’, ‘In progress’ and ‘Closed’ though most software development workflows have more complex steps. You can then progress these tasks through workflow statuses to completion.
It works with principles of a continuous flow of work within a ‘work in progress’ (WIP) limit. So your board would display all work currently in progress including resource allocations, and new tasks are added as capacity becomes available.
MantisHub supports a Kanban plugin that allows you to create and interact with Kanban boards within your projects. It supports a ‘Standard View’ that displays issues in columns that correspond to your defined MantisHub status values, and a ‘Swim Lane View’ which will introduce rows according showing the assigned user or resource. Kanban boards created in MantisHub are linked to a tag, and issues with the relevant tag attached would be visible on the given board as a ‘card’. You can then interact with the cards (drag/drop) to make changes to your issues.
This feature is ideal for running your regular software development sprints. You could have a board created per sprint and ‘tag’ nominated issues to place on your Kanban board, move these issues through you workflow statuses to resolution and then remove issues after they are closed. Outstanding issues can be re-tagged for the next sprint.
The Kanban board format provides transparency for your team for all on-going work and allows you to visualize the progress of each task through the workflow to resolution and closure. The team can feel a sense of achievement in meeting goals where work delivery is continuous and not always linked to a product ‘release’. It also allows you to ensure even distribution of work across your resources and identify any bottlenecks. The methodology is highly popular in project management and software development and has proven effective in eliminating bottlenecks, reducing cycle time and facilitating faster feedback and delivery of changes.
Don’t forget MantisHub has a free trial so you can sign up, obligation free and test it out! Have a read of our Kanban plugin support documentation and learn how to add, move and remove issues from your Kanban boards. And check out all our other features like email notifications, workflow customizations, group actions and third party integrations that will add value to your Kanban functionality but automating team communications, workflow process and efficiency.
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