Forums/Tips & Tricks
Keep your board clear with the Icebox and Archive
Kanbanery Support
posted this on May 29, 2011 08:00
Your Kanbanery board performs at it's best with less content, and coincidentally, so does your team. We've created places off the board to store tasks that you don't need to think about either because they are done (the Archive) or because they won't be started for some time (the Icebox).
When your last column (probably "Done") is getting full, you can dump all of the tasks from it off the board and into the archive by clicking the archive all icon at the top of the column. Then the tasks are moved to the Archive, and you can review them using the Archive link in the main navigation.
If you have a task that you know you won't do for a long time, like a good suggestion or a very minor bug, you can get it off the board by clicking the Icebox icon on the task card. You can always visit the Icebox from the main navigation and move tasks back onto the board when you're ready to think about them.
Comments
This is great and we use both features. However the archive is included in the last column statistics in the cumulative flow chart. This makes reading the chart rather difficult depending on what you want to look at.
What about adding a "Include Archive" checkbox that if unset removes the archive information?
That's true. The archive is part of the CFD, because the last column is for done items, and so is the archive. I deal with this on big, old projects by hiding the done data on the CFD.
I don't see any icebox icon on the task card. Where is that supposed to be?
It's in the lower right corner when you show the tools. You can only icebox tasks in the first column, since presumably if they have been pulled from the first column, someone is working on them. The icebox icons looks like a snowflake:
I don't have a snowflake (see attached file)
Wow. I've never seen that before. Is that task in the first column (on the far left)? If so, we've got a really suspicious bug.
No, it was not in the far left column. If I move it there, the snowflake appears. So there is no bug, but the instructions are unclear. But instead of changing the instructions, I would argue that it should be possible to send tasks to the icebox from any column (we are talking about agile process management, right?).
Christoph,
It is more in keeping with our philosophy that you should be able to do anything in Kanbanery that you can do on a physical board. I can't see a good reason to FORBID our users from iceboxing anything they want to. I'll just have to confirm with the dev team that it won't have funny side effects, like breaking the lead time calculation.
perhaps it could be an option that you can select in the settings menu (and which should be activated by default).
BTW: I appreciate that you say that it is Kanbanery's philosophy that you can do everything that you can also do with a physical board because that means you should also allow tasks to be added to any column (see however this discussion: http://support.kanbanery.com/entries/20170687-where-is-the-add-task-button). In my case it is very annoying to have tasks added only to the first column because in my workflow I have multiple steps from a task showing up in that column to it actually being on the to-do list (more specifically speaking, I add "projects" or larger tasks to the left column and these then need to be broken down into smaller pieces before they can really be dealt with in the to-do column). At the same time, we all have ad hoc tasks coming up as you work and these often need to go directly to "today" or "this week". Kanbanery makes this very cumbersome.
That's a good point. I suppose if you are using Kanbanery as a series of unrelated lists and don't mind that your metrics are useless, that should be up to you.
Well, you are right that it should be possible. But I also think that the metrics should be able to cope with adding tasks in the middle and treat it the same way as adding it at the beginning and immediately moving it one or more columns ahead, like I have to do now.
I's like to say that I am not using Kanbanery as "a series of unrelated lists". They do reflect my workflow. The thing is just that some tasks don't enter that workflow from at the beginning.
The metrics would still be there, but they'd work at bit differently. For example, the CFD would still show how many tasks were in each column at the end of a day, but it wouldn't illustrate flow except in those columns in which tasks actually do flow from one column to the next. The lead time and cycle time could work, but again, not for columns that tasks don't flow through. For example, a common setup is to make the first or second column the start of the lead time calculation, but if a new task appears somewhere else on the board, it will never have been in the first column, so it wouldn't be counted towards the lead time. You'd have to carefully define the start and end points for your lead and cycle time calculations to get accurate data. The formula works fine, but the outcome is only as good as the data that goes in.