The agility comes from not overloading features by putting the customer on your focus. It also comes from collaborative work where all gaps in latency are filled with everyone pulling together. It certainly comes from dividing work on smaller chunks. Agile moves faster, but not by running. It moves faster by re-engineering the process that the members of the team need to release working software.

What do you think?

The only question that comes to mind is now, what is the origin of South Park themed avatars with software developers? I will try to find out and update.

1. Agile Zen

Agile Zen is a simple, pay per month Agile tool that gets extra points for their do-good philosophy. If you work for a not-for profit organisation you get 50% off their already low price. Also, if you are working on a open source project, you get the tool for free.

The only downside to it I find is how, at this time is only offered as a hosted tool. However, if you want to try it out today, you can! Head over to AgileZen today to get started.

2. Flow

Flow is a hip-hop sounding ( horrible joke ) Agile tool based on Kanban, that allows you to visualize your work and organise and assign tasks amongst team member. One of the most powerful features of Flow is the accurate estimates of progress and pending work based on past performance. It also includes a vast range of metrics such as “Backlog to Done” cycle, Idle Time, etc.

The price is 5$ per person per month, if you want to seize a 30 days free trial, go have a look at Flow

3. Pivotal tracker

We had mentioned this tool a while ago http://agileevangelists.co.uk/task-management-software-pivotal-tracker/ so it is just polite to include it in our list. Pivotal Tracker balances well being complete with including just the essential, so you can focus on getting things done ( and code!). Did I mention is free too?

4. Hansoft

hansoft

Accordingly, fees per user go at about £20 per month, but if you feel you need its full power, it may be worth a shoot at the 2-users free trial.

5. Kanbanery

Kanbanery is a easy, simple and elegant Scrum and kanban solution with a colum layout allowing you to observe your workflow easily. It is certainly one of the simplest and cheapest solution ( $19 a month ), so it is well suited for small teams or even for your own personal use. Actually, with Ipad and Iphone support, there is no reason not to Kanban your life 24/7.

However, not for focused on usability does it lose its power. With Kanbanery you can clearly observe your task story and average lead time, making easy for you to spot bottlenecks and improve your workflow.

6. Lino.

Lino

Pricing is also part of the good news. Lino is a freemium tool, with a $3 dollars account permitting larger storage and unlimited download and search functionalities.

7. Radtrack

Radtrack is an open source kanban project used to create kanban boards that you can drag and drop from Backlog to Requested, In progress to Done. It can also yield different team members.

In addition, Being Open source means you can work on it (https://github.com/jgoodsen/radtrack-core#readme ) and that is free to use forever. Top man @jgoodsend for having created it and shared it with everyone.

8. Target Process.

This is one of the most powerful Agile tools, with an impressive range of reporting features (burn down charts ), a kanban board, sprints, iterations, tasking and integration with favourite tools you may already been using such as Visual Studio 2010, Eclipse, Subversion, JIRA, Bugzilla etc. The price for a hosted version is $25 and $225 for a desktop version.

There is a free version available for teams of 5 or less members, which can be a great way of testing the tool.

9.Simple kanban

Simple-Kanban is a Kanban board application and can be used in lean software development, ideal for stories development. It is as well open source, so free to use and work on. It comes as a simple downlodable HTML file.

Thanks to Stephan Schmidt for building it and releasing it. You can follow Stephan’s blog here: CodeMonkeysm

10. Ikan

Ikan is the Iphone/Ipad ( so far ) mobile application, brainchild of @ourfounder and Personal kanban. It is extremely stripped down and totally versatile for you to use in any sort of project. Best of all, goes with you anywhere.

It includes integration with Zen too, so if you are the Iphone type, go to the app store and download it for free

We are hugely satisfied with both the content of the meeting and the turnover. The chosen topic, Kanban, proved to be quite a success as a considerable amount of software professionals are shifting their attention to this system. In regards to atendess, we had about 70 professionals from all sorts from testers to BA’s and just about every imaginable occupation, which we think adds great value to the conversation.

Besides our analysis, we could not do AE without the input of our community. We asked some kind atendees their opinion about the event. Not all opinions were good, but as you can see, most were. Rather than ignore negative input we take it to heart, and we promise to learn from any mistakes. Nevertheless, it seems it is going to be very difficult to improve.

We are working hard in Agile Evangelists 05 and will update very soon. We are reviewing your suggestions and will carefully choose a subject and speakers. So please, if you have any ideas about what should be the next Agile Evangelists about, get in touch ( hello >> AT >> agileevangelists.co.uk ).

Skills Matter is committed to providing as many opportunities as possible to learn organising events, conferences and courses and produce hundreds of podcasts featuring real experts such as Martine Devos, Craig Larman, Mary Poppendieck, Ellen Gottesdiener, Mike Vizdos, David Laribee, Gojko Adzic, Mike Vizdos, Rachel Davies, Allan Kelly, Antony Marcano, Linda Rising, Jutta Eckstein and many other leading Agile innovators.

They also organise the annual Agile, Lean & Kanban eXchange (a 2-day unconference, Dec 2-3, 2010) and Agile Testing & BDD eXchange (Nov 19, 2010) every year.

So, if you are passionate about Agile leadership, Agile requirements, and developing remarkable software with successful teams, check out what’s happening on Skills Matter’s website and follow them on Twitter.

The Iphone application

I can hardly find a better way to implement kanban in your daily life than an IPhone application. this is why Personal Kanban have created Ikan. With a very simple ( less is more ) inteface with three columns ( ready, doing and done ) you can visualise all your work, set your expectations and be always aware of your workload. Data from other project management applications, such as AgileZen can be imported and we can only expect more integrations to come. Lastly, for all thos kanban-savvy tweak setting for a personal WIP and a higher number of columns with your own names.

If you are an Android developer and reckon you can create a “Kandroid” to life, get in touch with Personal Kanban here.

Personal Kanban, The Book

For all those wishing to get a good understanding of how to implement KanBan in their own lifes,Personal Kanban, the book is coming soon. Introducing lean principles essential to Kanban philosophy, the book gives the clues you need to become effective, and take the lead of the growind demand of tasks and workload in both professional and personal realms.

You can get a full review of the book, plus some glowing recommendations, here

Other kanban Tools

If you are a sfotware developer on a Kanban or agile team, here is a list of tracking and visualising tools, brought to you by Limited WIP Society, a group of avid bloggers with a passion for lean development.

Born in Japan in the context of manufacturing cars and tightly related to software development agile practices, Kanban is a powerful and simple enough methodology of project management to make a huge thrust in our lifes and change the way we go about completing tasks.

Jim Benson and Tonniane have founded Personal Kanban out of sheer passion for the possibilities of KanBan to make our lifes more productive and less bound to crumble down with stress. Personal Kanban is here to help us handle the higher expectations bestowed upon us to juggle multiple tasks and duties.

In kanban, there are two basic principles to:

1) Visualise your work. At all times, ensure you can visualise what you need done so your capacity is nor overwhelmed, but also as to not lose focus of the ensuing steps and tasks to take up on.

2) Limit your work in progress. The argument is simple, but the ability to limit the amount of tasks to the ideal level can only be learnt with practise and expertise. I particularly like their chef metaphor, whereby chefs just know how much can they cook in an hour by always controlling the time food needs to be cooked throughout.

Practise makes perfection, so start implementing Kanban in your daily life as soon as possible with these tools.

If you want to start right here right now to implement kanban, check the following tools.

In this occasion, we have decided to focus our attention on Kanban, a scheduling system that tells you what to produce, when to produce it, and how much to produce. And who best to spark the debate than our speakers (link). If you wish to attend to this free event, just register here or fill the form on your right.

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Some people will argue that we spend too much time thinking about what method can we use to organise our productivity rather than to just get things done. I think this argument is flawed and much more when it comes to coding and agile projects, where cooperation and coordination are as crucial as progress.

Here, we have tried a lot of solutions to work as a team between departments and within them. We tried Remember the Milk and Basecamp and we now get away with a Google docs, placing timelines in a spreadhseet. There is a lot we have learned from agile practise when it comes to tasking.

Thankfully today, we have come across this discussion in The Software testing Club where Rob Lambert introduced an agile-specific project management tool: Pivotal Tracker. he says “It’s awesome, it’s fast, it’s sleek, it’s great for basic task management, it’s great for agile/backlog management and best of all, it’s free”.

Worth a try then. Certainly the features are great and so are the glowing testimonials. However, back to the original question, do we spend too long finding, using and retrieving information from to-do, PM and tasking software. Should we not just get on with it sometimes?
What are your thoughts?