There are still many open source kanban tools available, contrary to open source projects for Scrum tools that have mostly ended being transformed in a limited offer that supports a main commercial product. The simplicity of the Kanban approach has allowed open source software developers to create and maintain Kanban tools based on various platforms.
Bugzilla is a popular open source bug tracker created originally by the Mozilla Foundation. It has an open architecture that allows extending its basic functionalities. This article lists the Bugzilla plugins, called add-on in Bugzilla, that allows integrating an Agile project management approach like Scrum or Kanban around the bug tracking features of Bugzilla.
In the context of software development, Kanban is an approach based on Lean that tries to limit waste and work in progress to the actual capacity of the software development team. The aim of Kanban is to create a context that balances capacity and demand through a value stream and promote visual project management.
Trello is a free on-line project management tool owned by Atlassian that provides a flexible and visual way to organize anything. This approach is naturally close to the visual boards used in the Scrum or Kanban approaches. As the tool as an open architecture, some extensions have been developed for a better implementation of Agile project management in Trello and provides additional features like Scrum burndown charts or the implementation of WIP limits.
What fascinates me the most in the Lean software development approach is the quality of the people that support it. Mary and Tom Poppendieck are not an exception to this rule. Their book “Leading Lean Software Development” achieves the seemingly contradictory goals of being very insightful but still easy and captivating to read.
The definitive talk on Work in Progress (WIP) talks about getting things done. From team-level to whole-enterprise scale, the amount of work inside the system directly affects the amount of value being delivered.
Which is better, Agile or Kanban? Actually, the answer is not quite that simple. Agile development and Lean, where Kanban comes from, are both related approaches to software development. Agile project management guides us to work in chunks, called Scrum Sprints or Iterations, Kanban also aims to work in smaller steps.
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