No Huddle Offense

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Story board for agile development

July 14th, 2010 • 1 Comment

I’m a fan of software development processes. They need to be simple and easy to follow. Now one thing I like are so called task/story boards for agile development to keep track of stuff in the pipeline. What I do not like is that tool support is rather not good. Most people seem to be using ‘real’ task/story boards with paper and pen. That is not an option for me – since I’m not always in the same place 🙂

Other tools are so overblown that they are hardly usable – and again an external tool makes that the stories and their states are not stored near the source code – where the belong IMHO.

So I stumbled upon simple-kanban an easy tool where you basically can just drag and drop stories around based on their state. There is a very simple editor for editing the stories and the best feature is: It’s an single HTML file which you can check-in next to your source code in your SCM. And with the web browser integrated in eclipse even open in your IDE.

Only feature missing was that this board couldn’t store the information – you had to manually copy the stories from the editor and paste them into the HTML file, which you could save then:

Go to the data view and copy all stories. Then simply edit the source of the HTML file with an editor of your choice, preferably one which knows HTML. There you can paste the copied stories over the old ones and save the HTML file.

I didn’t like that – and since I knew of tiddlywiki, which is another single page application (SPA), which can store data, I thought I can update it. So I took the saving features from the wiki (described here BTW) and integrated them with the simple-kanban board. Now I have a save button and do not need to do nasty copy & pastes into source codes.

BTW this is how it looks in Eclipse:

Nice for small projects, your to-dos (Getting Thinks Done (GTD)) or any other stuff…

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One response to “Story board for agile development”

  1. No Huddle Offense » Blog Archive » My Software Development Environment for Python says:
    February 21, 2011 at 2:04 pm

    […] Tracking – Since I’m coding in small teams only I find a story board which is located next to the code most convenient. For bigger teams I would favor […]