If you want to do Kanban right, double down on making it possible to design actual Kanban workflows. Pretty ticket UI with checklists and GIFs must be secondary to this goal.
Things that most actual Kanban flows have that no one has built into a decent product[0]:
- Nested columns in lanes
- Rows for class-of-service
- WIP limits (per lane, per column, and per class-of-service)
- Sub-boards for meta issues
The actual content of each work item is the least important part of Kanban; it could be a hyperlink for all I care. Kanban is about managing the flow, not managing the work.
[0] Please prove me wrong if there is such a product out there!
I really like kanbanflow as a product. For example they also have a pretty nice integrated pomodoro timer with interruption logging.
However the reason I moved back to Trello was the interface was a bit old-fashioned, and I found it hard to get my team on-board on kanbanflow wheras it was really easy to get them going on Trello.
I agree that this is important. Optimizing and integrating the tools is a fairly significant part of my work, when I am leading a small team. Webhooks and a plugin framework are decent compromises, but there are so many times when I just want to dive into the code to increment a constant, or subclass and extend a method that doesn't have an externally accessible hook.
It’s always surprising to me how many “lean” and “agile” productivity tools completely focus on the artifacts and seem to have skipped the core concepts entirely.
It's a bummer because in the current state, Wekan doesn't really provide much real management value. I really wanted to use it for Kanban, because it's one of the flagship applications of the fantastic Sandstorm cloud platform (https://sandstorm.io), to introduce some colleagues to both concepts at the same time... but I guess I will only show them about the later.
Well at least it implements subtasks (checklists)!
Yes, Wekan does not have those features yet. Anyway, Wekan is being actively developed and features added. Wekan is friendly community driven project and welcomes all contributions.
Some have commented on Wekan GitHub issues that they prefer to use Wekan, because some others project management tools are overkill, or don't have the same usability as Wekan. It depends on use case.
Thing is, it's specifically labeled a kanban board. WiP limits are fundamental to kanban. They're why kanban works. People may prefer it to other tools; that's fine, but it doesn't mean it's not missing the point by not being an actual kanban board implementation.
I find rows counterproductive; they make it less obvious how full the board is, and don't help make better decisions. By all means sort each column in priority order so that people picking up a new task know which to pick up first; that's a lot less intrusive and covers the important use case.
Likewise sub-boards and meta-issues. If we're doing agile properly then each card represents a user-facing deliverable. Allowing meta-issues encourages doing the wrong thing.
Limiting work in progress I've achieved by having people assign themselves to cards, and questioning those who are on multiple cards. In the cases where we're violating our work-in-progress limit, I'd rather have the board reflect reality than not.
Targetprocess.com had all these features - I loved swim lanes for projects - but the UI was unusably slow (clearly not designed with an app framework at the core) when we tried it two years ago. I've been looking for something better ever since.
Like most of their IDEs, it's not about UX but about features. And on that point, they have done a lot!
Having used it for some projects as an alternative to JIRA, Trello, GitLab boards, and a few others that I tried, I think it's not perfect, quite hard to use for non-tech users, but much better than most of the alternatives.
The number of details/settings available is great compared to Trello or GitLab. The pricing/hosting is great compared to JIRA. The non-tech usability is much better in JIRA and Trello, but for a tech team, it has many small things/shortcuts like ones you already use in their IDEs which is really great.
There are hundreds of tools like this, and I tried maybe 20 or 30 of them; the thing is, there is no perfect tool out there, and there won't be as use cases for such a tool can be extremely different! YouTrack gets a lot of points right for a tech team from my experience though.
The product I've been working on the last few months has all the things you listed, mostly: http://cwkanban.com/ . It's been a huge help to my own team's workflow.
But it's not general-purpose like Wekan or Trello; it's focused on workflow for managed IT and at the moment only pulls ticket data from ConnectWise, software for managed services providers.
I suppose- mostly I'm unsure to what extent "sub-boards for meta issues" makes sense when card data is drawn from an external source, as in our product.
Things that most actual Kanban flows have that no one has built into a decent product[0]:
The actual content of each work item is the least important part of Kanban; it could be a hyperlink for all I care. Kanban is about managing the flow, not managing the work.[0] Please prove me wrong if there is such a product out there!