A recent issue came up on the team yesterday. We needed to increase the visibility of what we’re working on without dragging ourselves into more one on one or team communication. As anyone that has spent more than 5 minutes with a team knows, meetings kill productivity and morale, so the idea to get a kanban board going was brought up.
That raised the second issue of a remotely distributed team. We can’t have a real kanban board and the literal presence that it provides by being physical. The next best thing though is to have a virtual kanban board that integrates well into our workflow. With integration we get to look at it regularly and work around it to communicate where and what we’re working on without it becoming a major interruption.
That left the need for a kanban board with github integration. I thought to myself, “this exists right?” I checked the ole’ Internet tubes and sure enough someone had posed the question on StackOverflow! The question read, “What’s the best kanban tool to use with github?” Unfortunately there wasn’t a whole lot of answers or information following that up. However, the one answer that did exist provided an interesting solution.
Hubbard
The simple one page site is located here: http://huboard.com/ and on Github here: https://github.com/rauhryan/huboard. This describes the product a bit, and Ryan Rauh(@rauhryan) has a blog entry on Los Techies titled “Huboard – Github issues made Awesome“. You can also follow Huboard on Twitter @Huboard.
(Screenshots courtesy of Ryan’s Blog Entry, click any of them to go to his blog entry)
Where I’m At…
At this point I’m just checking it out, forking the code, and seeing how it works. This tool looks very promising however and fits into the workflow in an extremely seamless way!
