Rally Software

I want to use Kanban to track small production support tasks.  Which board is best to you HW Kanban or BA Kanban?

Hi Denise,

Thank you for your question. I would like to get some more information from you when you have the chance. You mentioned HW and BA Kanban boards. Are these custom Kanban boards already in your subscription, or are they a specific Kanban process?

If you are wanting to use Tasks on your Board I would recommend using the Custom Board which will display tasks directly unlike the Kanban board. The Custom Board is very similar to the Kanban board but allows for greater flexibility. You can find more information about the Custom Board here Custom Board | CA Agile Central Help 

Please let us know your questions and we will be happy to help. 

This was helpful.  I added a Custom Board app and a Kanban app to compare the two. When adding work items to the Custom Board, story was the only option in the drop down.  I am leaning towards using the Kanban because the drop down gives me the stories and defect options.  In production support, most of our work is to resolve defects that have occurred in production.  Also, is there a way to customize the drop down to add 'research' work items?  Thank you!

Denise, 

By the way here's the Kanban Board Help article: Kanban Board | CA Agile Central Help  

There's not a separate "research" work item in Agile Central. The work items available in Agile Central are limited to the default ones in the tool, including User Story, Defects, Tasks, Portfolio Items, Test Cases, Test Sets, etc etc.  From the Kanban Board though, it's limited to adding a User Story or Defect card. 

Here at CA on the Agile Central Engineering team, we have a working agreement that when we have a "research" item, we actually create something we call a "Spike" story. That basically means that we are simply researching whether something is possible and how hard it would be to do!  So the card would look like this:

How about some other community members -- how do you handle "research" work items?  EricNash SeshVeeraraghavan1363555 BeckyBittner1340079 DanPoling1351581Gio_Sanchez the.EIT.Toolbox.Officer Agile_Central_Tooler jessica.freestone 

This sounds an awful lot like the sort of work that some of my teams do, but I could use a bit of context. Can you define HW and BA? Not sure what you're referring to there. And when you ask about adding "research" work items, do you think of these as something other than user stories? As JohnStreeter mentions, in Agile practices we'd typically consider research work to be a "spike" and for my teams that's just a user story that we identify with a custom field, tag or card color to distinguish it from other work.

I'd be careful not to let the nomenclature in Agile Central lead you too far into using Tasks. What you describe as a production support task is probably just a small user story, and it sounds as though you're already moving in the right direction there. Anyway, if you'd like to elaborate a bit more here then I'm sure that we can give you some decent pointers. Hope that helps.

Thanks Eric!

Using 'spike' for research items sounds like a good idea.  Please clarify the benefit of the Custom Board.  It appears the drop down only shows the option to add a user story..not a defect.  I created a custom Kanban with custom columns.  It has the dropdown that allows me to add either User story or a defect.  I will be happy to share with you what I am trying to do.  Thank you.

Hi Denise,

In this case the only benefit is that it will display tasks in a similar format to the Kanban board. If you go to the Settings for the Custom Board by clicking the gear icon in the upper right of the app you can select the type of item you would like to be displayed. If you select Task in the Custom Board setting then it will display tasks and you will have the option to add a task rather than a story. You can then add a filter for Work Item so only Tasks associated to a specific story are displayed, or you could use the advanced filter so that tasks associated to a group of stories are displayed. If you're interested you can find more detailed information about how to setup the board here Custom Board | CA Agile Central Help 

If you just need to work with stories the Kanban board will work great, but if you planning to use tasks then the Custom Board is worth checking out.