hagmonk / Org Kanban

• org-kanban

The start of what might eventually be a useful personal kanban mode for org. Warning: not even alpha software!

[[file:screenshot.png][file:screenshot.png]]

** About

This package contains a single useful function, org-kanban, that lets you open several editing windows into the same org-mode file, so that it can be visualized as a kanban board.

The function is currently hard coded to look for the first top level heading, and treat all direct children of that heading as the "states" of your kanban board.

org-refile-targets is overridden in this buffer, so that refile actions are focused on moving items between the different states.

** Help

This is obviously an incredibly limited tool at the present, and I'm really just releasing it so prematurely in order to solicit feedback and help from the community. It works for my purposes, but to make it work for your purposes, I'm hoping you'll help by collaborating on some of the polish that makes it useful outside my own .emacs file :)

• [ ] Package as a proper emacs package.

• [ ] Write tests.

• [ ] Allow custom Kanban states using org-agenda match syntax.

• [X] Log timestamps as properties when refiling.

• [ ] Log refile count to track "churn".

  Items that bounce around a lot are good candidates for review.

• [ ] Allow setting WIP constraints for each state.

• [ ] Velocity visualization.

  Given an org file with the right properties and history, we can calculate statistics for the user. These could include many interesting queueing measurements, such as average wait time via Little's Law, and capacity utilization.

• [ ] Backlog focus mode.

  Special mode that helps users triage large backlogs. This could incorporate multiple views of the same "state" subtree, each sorted / grouped in a different way.

  For instance, one might wish to see:

  • all items sorted by last refile time.
  • all items sorted by priority.
  • items grouped by the week/month that they were refiled.
  • items grouped by some arbitrary tag, then sorted by priority and refile time.
  • some kind of "smart" weighted list that considers priority, refile time, churn, tags, etc?

• [ ] Support multi-person kanban boards.

** Resources

Interested in project management, kanban, and all that good stuff?

*** [[https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Product-Development-Flow-Generation/dp/1935401009][The Principles of Product Development Flow - D. Reinertsen]] *** [[https://www.amazon.com/Personal-Kanban-Mapping-Work-Navigating/dp/1453802266][Personal Kanban - Jim Benson]] *** [[https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002][The DevOps Handbook - Gene Kim, et al]] *** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7oz366X0-8][The Cynefin Framework - Dave Snowden]] (youtube) *** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyEtKpqqx_s][The Big Ideas Behind Lean Product Development - Don Reinertsen]] (youtube)