Initial Setup

Quick and easy setup

Simply enter your email address and click continue, then follow the prompts as shown in the video below. See further down for more configuration options.

Unless you obtained KanDo from an invitation to join an existing organization, KanDo automatically creates a free local organization for evaluation purposes only. Note that this organization resides only in your browser’s storage space and is never shared with other browsers. You will only be able to access it from that single browser and clearing the browser data will delete any data you entered.

The default configuration for this organization is typical for product development and supports sprints, uses points for estimations, and enables workflows.

For a typical professional services environment, using hours for estimation is mostly unavoidable and different projects might benefit from milestones over sprints.

Sprints vs Milestones

A milestone has a start and end dates, and reflects a specific goal, e.g., a BETA release.
A sprint is an agile milestone of fixed length and repeats until the project is complete.
For professional services both have value and should be chosen based on the specific nature of the work to be done.

For your personal todo list, CI/CD SDLC or ‘just-in-time’ agile development, you may wish to skip milestones and sprints altogether and just stick with the project as your container. Statistics will be generated for weeks and/or months.

General Settings

Work Item Types

Making a work item type a container will result in it only showing up in the tree, search, and documentation views. Containers do not show up on the Kanban board or on the workflow views.

Marking an item type as a bug will mean that its data will be included in statistics about bugs in the dashboard.

Marking an item as ‘is timeboxed’ is currently only informational.

Workflows

The workflows are what makes KanDo shine.

They allow for useful metrics and a clear view of how your SDLC works. Each work type has its own workflow which is very simply defined by a series of steps. You can add, move, remove steps. Important to note that each work item actually gets its own workflow, meaning changes here will not affect items that have already been created. The reason being you may encounter the odd occasion where a piece of work does not fit any of your regular workflows, in which case KanDo lets you adjust a workflow all the way down to the individual work item and still automatically collect related information for your dashboard.

Team

To invite a team member to your organization, follow the directions in this short video. Note this is not available in the free evaluation org.

What are you building?

Are you building and maintaining a product with long term development plans? Bespoke software or custom integrations in a professional services model? Either way KanDo offers you the tools that match how you deliver value to your clients.

The standard project model

Projects in KanDo are time limited and are best suited for short term projects or professional services engagements. Unending projects have mid to long term undesirable effects with changes in processes and people affecting the consistency of the data collected. So, if you are working on a more long-term model, then use an R&D Cycle.

Cycles

Cycles are ‘projects’ that don’t have a fixed ending but have a regular (or not) cycle that typically match a regular technical delivery schedule, or sales or business cycle.

Whether you use projects or cycles, following these models helps prevent degradation of your historical data when comes the time to adjust your workflow, or your team turns-over.

Project and Cycle Creation

KanDo almost always operates in the context of a single project or cycle. Everything you see will be in reference to the currently selected project or cycle.

Set start and end dates or specify a cycle and give your project a name and a 3 to 5 letter key that will be used to identify the project in different areas of KanDo.

Project Charter

Whenever you create a project in KanDo, you automatically get a project documentation page. This is to support single source of truth for project information that you can share with anyone and control the level of access to.

KanDo uses Markdown for its documentation pages, allowing for rich documents. It uses GitHub Flavored Markdown (gfm). The Markdown Guide is a great source for using the language.

A default template is used to populate the project overview with common practice sections to fill out. You can edit this template or create a new one you can set as the default when creating new projects.