KanDo Features

Meaningful work items

KanDo is designed on general agile and lean principles and initially configured for software projects. You can rename and configure all item types to suit your needs, either at the organization level, or the project/cycle level.

For software projects KanDo™ provides for specific types of work items commonly used in agile software development and professional services engagements:

Initiative
Another container type when Epics are simply not enough.
Epic
Typical agile container for grouping work in large projects.
Spike
Investigative work item. e.g., does that 3rd party API let us do ‘X’?
User Story
Describes functionality from the user’s perspective. Intended to be the smallest unit of work and can be accomplished within a single sprint.
Task
Generic, often used as sub-task.
Bug
You know, just in case …
Technical Debt
Technical debt is usually code that needs to be refactored to ensure maintainability or robustness of a product. As an work item type, it is meant to be a single activity that can be completed in a sprint.
Process Improvement
Sometimes you have to spend time on building tools that significantly improve the delivery process. This is the type to use.

Configuring Work Item Types

However, it is possible to reconfigure every type for a given org and or project, and pretty much anything about the type:

Icon
Name
Colors
Text, where you can provide both a French and an English name to service users who work in one language or the other.
Description
Whether it should act as a container (No workflow)
Whether it is a bug (allows for bug specific reporting)
Whether it is a timeboxed type // TBD
What kind of child items it can have
Workflow
You can even hide work items you don’t use

You can also edit the French version of the text for those who would use the French version of KanDo.

Templates

Documentation pages and work item type get their own template that you can modify. You can also add more templates for each type, for instance, you may have a template with guiding questions for specific areas of the product. Here as well you can define a French version of the templates.

Track the things that matter

Good information is key to any inspect and adapt practice, so KanDo provides fields that capture not just the details of the work to be done but also captures details of your process with workflows, where every participant’s work is identified and tracked with surprisingly little effort.

3 column Kanban

You only ever need 3 columns to see whats happening.

Workflows

However, you should have workflows tailored to your current needs. How about a workflow per type of work? Below you can view workflows for tasks and bugs.

Child items

KanDo lets items have sub tasks that have sub taks and as an option to prevent advancing of parent item while children are not completed.

And you can view your work items in a tree view:

Where’s the beef?

Most every screen in KanDo provides useful information about the state of your project starting with the project page:

Project Screen

This screen displays a list of sprints or milestones sortable by date.

The icons indicate the state of each sprint or milestone.

Pending / To Do

In Progress

Ended with remaining items

Completed

In progress milestones display overall progress in both counts of items and estimate.

A closed milestone displays the final statistics for the milestone, which are used to generate historical charts.

Work item card

Whether on the Backlog, Kanban or on the workflow board, the cards display a lot of useful information about the state of the work:

The breadcrumb trail at the top indicates the org > project > [… >] direct parent >.
The icon indicates the type of work.
current indicates the current workflow step for this item.
next indicates the next step in the workflow.
The avatar identifies the current owner of the work.
The number in a circle indicates the number of points assigned to this work item.
The name of the sprint / milestone is listed.
Finally, in the bottom right corner, a small indice indicating the priority of the work item as ordered in the Kanban.

The dashboard

Finally, the dashboard is where you get high level views and the ability to dig into the details of your projects. From progress charts and tables to, historical statistics, using metrics that are designed to show how well you meet your goals and what part of your process needs improvement.