Color your Kanban

It was quite a while back now when I posted about Phillipe Krutchen’s idea of coloring the items of a blacklog to make their purpose more visible (visibility is an important part of agile and lean). Specifically, he recommended separating Features, Architecture, Defects and Technical Debt. You can read my old post and check out Phillipe’s presentation if you want to understand this better.

We wanted to be able to use the colors idea but at the time we were using Eric Davis’ Redmine Kanban. What I did was basically hack the plugin to add the ability to assign colors to four different issue tracker types, however until know if you wanted to try this you had to get my patch file and patch the plugin yourself.

No more! For those of you who don’t want to mess with patches you can now download it from my fork on GitHub. Do let me know if it is useful to you I’d be happy to hear about it. Though, I’m sure there are many ways in which it can be improved.

I was also looking at the videos for AgileZen, a commercial Kanban board site which also has the ability to color your Kanban items. It is very affordable (and is free for individuals with one board) and the interface looks really slick and dare I say fun, so I think I am going to go play with that a bit (sorry Eric). I will try to report back shortly on the level of “fun” to be had after using it for a while.

So now those craving a more colourful Kanban have two solutions (other than having many colors of post-its or stickers) available to them.