This weekend the latest version of the Kanban plugin for FogBugz went live. This is the first time I've blogged about the plugin for a few months. The current version has a lot of bug fixes, but it also has some cool new features. Some of these new features were inspired by my talks with people at the Open Agile Northwest Conference in February.

Multiple Simultaneous Editors

Originally, I only invisioned having one person edit the board at a time, but almost immediately after we started using it at icanhascheezburger.com, it became clear that my assumption was bad, and people would commonly accidentally squash one another's changes. The latest version allows multiple people to edit the board at the same time, and will automatically sort out conflicts. Additionally, it will automatically reload the board if someone edits the board, so you don't need to worry about seeing a stale version.

Custom Colors

Often, when a physical Kanban board is used, people will use certain colors of post-it notes to mean specific things. One of the really powerful aspects of Kanban is that people decide what the colors mean for the way they are using the Kanban. To better support this, you can now easily add your own colors, and name them something meaningful for your Kanban.

Kanban Metrics

Kanban, like all agile development methodologies, has at its core the ability (no, requirement) to evolve over time to improve your development process. (If you aren't constantly tweaking your process, then you aren't being agile.) In order to understand what is happening on your board (and hence your process), it is important to understand how items are flowing across your board. The latest version of the plugin tracks items as they move across the board and provides some statistics on what has happened, making it easier to see where your bottlenecks are and to understand your flow. These reports will almost certainly evolve over time, but they should be pretty useful in their current state.

I am really excited to see 2.0.3.7 on FogBugz OnDemand, and I look forward to getting feedback on what is working and what can be improved. The plugin is a free download.