KanbanFX

Some Thoughts in General

I have been kind of lazy writing this blog lately. After keeping it up pretty okay during summer, the pace has now slowed to a minimum. I think it can be partly explained by the fact that I have been using Twitter for some of the stuff I used to write here and that my new HTC Hero Android phone made tweeting more convenient than ever…

My intentions are to use this blog for subjects that cannot easily be said in 140 characters and twitter for the short, more daily stuff…

Well, so what has happened since last time. Since I have solely been using NetBeans the last couple of years for Java development, I decided to give Eclipse Gallileo a chance. It took me an hour of frustration to conclude that it still sucks for Maven based projects. Why it should be so hard is beyond my comprehension! In NetBeans, you just choose open project, selects the pom.xml file and everything is fine. Dependencies are resolved as they are defined in Maven, no stupid .classpath, .project and .settings rubbish created that makes Eclipse to totally hick-up if a dependency is changed.

Apart from my unsuccessful flirt with Eclipse, I have continued development of KanbanFX. It has been converted to a maven project and besided the information on Kenai, I have created a page for it here where you can try it out. Kanban is increasing in popularity, @henrikkniberg had 300 people on his Kanban vs Scrum session at JAOO this week.

KanbanFX

I really like the simplicity in Kanban. It should be enough for most small projects, and especially AO teams. Even though all you really need as tool support is a white-board and a couple of post-it notes, larger organizations often require you to hook into existing tools for requirement management, issue tracking etc.

I have not been able to find any tool fulfilling this need, so I decided to create on myself. Thereby, KanbanFX was born!

KanbanFX is a JavaFX implementation of a Kanban board. Source code and a very limited demo version is available on Kenai:

http://kenai.com/projects/kanbanfx.

Please join the project if you want to contribute. I am pretty sure that I will need help with at least the graphical elements when we get to that…