First prototype of Team Foundation Server 2010 Kanban board
Update: See progress by following the Visual WIP tag or go to the project at VisualWIP.codeplex.com
I have been looking for a Team Foundation Server Kanban board for some time and have not found what I was looking for. Some of my criteria’s have been:
- Should be easy to setup and customize
- Don’t force me to use a specific TFS Project template
- It should be as easy to read the work items as when using post-it’s on a whiteboard
My thinking has been that the Kanban board had to support multiple monitors. The reason for this is the readability problem. With only one monitor you will either not see the whole board on you can’t read the text on the work items.
So after reading David J Anderson’s Kanban book I decided to build my own TFS Kanban board.
Below you see my first prototype.
Every window represent a separate step/state in the Kanban workflow. For every window you set:
- Step/state name – Development, Ready for test, Testing
- Work in progress limit – 2,2,3
- A TFS Query that should populate the state
This design makes the board very flexible both how you populate the step/state with work items and how you want to position the different steps/states on a multi monitor setup.
I try to use visual signals for the work in progress limits by drawing a white box for every available work in progress slot. If you exceed the limit no white box is drawn around the work item.
There are some more work to be done to get this prototype fully working and I need some help with the visual design to make it more appealing before I do some field trials before a first public release.
