With our newest update to Kerika, it’s become easier to organize the details of each card (i.e. the card’s description), in multilevel lists, like this:
This is done simply by using the Tab key to create an indented sub-list within an existing numbered list, and using the Back-Tab to “outdent” the list.
This also works with text blocks on canvases.
We have enhanced our recently introduced Archive feature, so that you can now copy a current project and paste a copy directly into your Archives:
One possible use-case for this, that some of our users have asked for, is to do quick backups that “capture current state” of important projects.
As with anything else that’s in the Archive, the copies you paste there are frozen, and can’t be changed unless and until you drag them out of the Archive and into your Projects list.
We have been hacking away at the application chrome within Kerika, removing some of the purely decorative elements that were starting to crowd out the user’s critical view of data.
Application chrome is like Kudzu: if you are not careful, what seemed like a nice-looking decoration on one part of the screen can quickly grow to overwhelm the application.
Here’s a before-and-after view of Kerika:
And here’s the same board, viewed with less application chrome, which allows the cards on the boards to stand out more:
This wasn’t just an aesthetic decision, although we are pleased with the new, cleaner appearance of Kerika: it was actually essential for our development of the new Planning View in Kerika, which lets you easily view a Task Board or Scrum Board from the perspective of Due Dates.
For the Planning View to work with workdays, it became essential to show more columns at a time, more of the time: showing at least 5 columns on most laptops became an essential requirement, and we could not achieve that solely by shrinking the width of cards — we also needed to remove the column chrome so that the board would not appear so crowded.
At the Jan 12, 2015 meeting of the Washington State Lean Practitioners Community of Practice meeting, organized by Results Washington at the Department of Labor & Industries in Tumwater, Arun Kumar presented Kanban in a Can: Capture, Visualize and Optimize your Everyday Processes.
Here’s the presentation on Slideshare (although most of it was actually a demo!):
The meeting was attended by dozens of Lean experts representing a huge variety of state agencies in Washington!
When you copy or cut an item on a Kerika board — a set of cards, or may be some things sitting on a Canvas — these objects are placed in a special Clipboard that sits on the Kerika server, not in your browser.
This is important to note for several reasons:
Some characters shouldn’t be used when you name a project — and we are going to make a change in Kerika that will rename any old projects you have to replace these characters with blank spaces — because they cause problems when you need to export the cards on your Task Board or Scrum Board.
Here’s what you need to avoid:
When you do an export, the exported data are stored in a file in your Google Drive (if you are using Kerika+Google) or your Box account (if you are using Kerika+Box) and these characters are used by these cloud services as file separator characters, which means they cannot be part of a file name.
So, your export will fail (and we end up logging an error on our server, which doesn’t make us happy either)
We did make a change in Kerika a month ago that stopped new projects from using these characters in their names, but it looks like there are still a bunch of old projects out there that have these characters in their names, and now we are going to try to clean up these as well.
When you archive a project, it’s possible that some cards still had Due Dates set on them: these dates are preserved along with all the other project data at the time you do the archiving.
But, these dates, which will inevitably become overdue dates over time, are not included in your 6AM task summary email, because there’s nothing you can do about them while the project remains in the Archive.
If you are working off a long Backlog (like we do at Kerika!), then you will have many Scrum Boards that pull items off this shared Backlog over time, and with our new Archive feature you will want to freeze old Scrum Boards as you get done with Sprints.
(Each Sprint should be done as a separate Scrum Board, that connects to the same Backlog.)
When you archive one particular Scrum Board, you only freeze that board: the Backlog remains available for use — and modification — by other Scrum Boards, now and in the future.
Which means that when you open an Archived Scrum Board, the view you will get of the Backlog will show the Backlog as it exists today, not as it existed when you archived the Scrum Board.
Here’s all the stuff we built in 2014, as far as we can remember…
January
February
March
April
We pondered integrating with Box. Pondered and pondered…
May
June
We got really serious about integrating with Box…
July
August
September
October
October was a really busy month.
November
December
Cards in the Done or Trash column, of a Task Board or Scrum Board, cannot be modified without first moving them out of Done or Trash: this is different from how boards worked before, and we made this change as part of our recent update where we introduced the concept of Archives.
There are a couple of reasons why we did this: