Introduction

More and more companies are using or starting to use the lean methodology. They do this to maximize the customer value while minimizing waste. As part of the lean methodology, these companies use a Kanban board to do a daily standup meeting. During such a daily standup meeting, everyone says what he has done and what he’s still working on. A Kanban board can look like this:

Problem

We noticed that a physical Kanban board is not always working for companies. It can be possible that people are working remote or working from other company sites which doesn’t allow them to attend the daily standup physically. Skype could be a solution for this, but we experienced that skype comes with some technical issues. For example, the camera quality is not great and it’s hard to read the board via skype, the audio quality is also not always good, …

Solution

We’ve created a digital Kanban board to solve this problem. This digital Kanban board is created with SAPUI5 on top of our SAP system combined with data from Jira. In the SAP system we created some tables to configure:

• Teams: Here we can connect a team with one or more Jira project
• Members: define the SAP users that are part of a team in the Kanban board
• Status: Mapping between Jira statuses and a name that we want to give to a column

We also have some table to store the result of the Daily Standup Meeting. We store information like:

• How much time did it took
• effectiveness
• Lean Coach
• The mood of each team member

This enables us to create analytics on top of this information and improve the process.

The app

The digital Kanban board exists out of 3 screens and a dialog to finalize the Daily Standup Meeting.

In the first screen, you can select:

• Your team/Project
• The time of the Daily Standup (this will be defaulted when you select the team but can be changed)
• Start date: Only show tickets that are changed after this date, this will hide older tickets that are not relevant anymore.
• End date: Will filter the Jira tickets to only show the tickets with a due date before the end date
• Bottleneck detection: default value is true

Second screen (when bottleneck detection = true):

Gives an overview of all the team members and the amount of Jira tickets. It will help us to find bottlenecks and find team members with too much/less tickets. It will visualize the data in three diverse ways:

1. Overview of all tickets separated in groups for each user for every status
2. Overview of all tickets separated in groups for each status for every user
3. Heatmap on user vs status

Third screen shows all the tickets that belong to team and the configured statuses in the SAP system.

• Starts by showing all blocking tickets
• Overview of team members and the status of their tickets
• All the Jira tickets with their status for each team member
• A Jira ticket has:
  • Information regarding the ticket
  • Status icon of the priority
  • Indicator if it’s changed recently
  • onHover to see more information like last changed, created date…
• Timer which will become red the last 3 minutes
• Legend
  • Can be used to filter the tickets on a certain component to reduce the amount of tickets on the board

Blocking tickets:

Digital Kanban Board:

Final dialog:

Here we can define the quality of kickoff meeting and the mood of every team member.

Finally, analytics based on BO:

This is a picture of how it’s being used:

Technical challenges

1. Combine the data from Jira and SAP
   1. First load data from SAP
   2. Use the data to create the query for Jira
   3. Put it together in one model
2. Table can have one or more columns and rows depending on the configuration
   1. Generic table completely generated with bindings
3. Custom control for a ticket
   1. Created a custom control to visualize a Jira ticket
   2. Added a popover integrated in the custom control to simulate an onhover effect
4. Colors in button group
   1. Extended the UI5 control to achieve this

Movie time!