Kanban in Action

Appendix B. Kanban tools

Some of the more common questions and suggestions we get when presenting kanban are about tooling: “Surely there must be an electronic tool to track stickies,” “But what if we’re distributed geographically? Would an online board be better?” and so on.

There are loads of tools out there, and many of them are useful and great. We haven’t talked too much about online, electronic tools in this book for a simple reason: this is a book about the principles and thinking of kanban and not about the tooling. When you understand the principles, you can bend the tools to your will.

We often suggest to new teams that they start on a physical board and then move to an electronic tool when they’ve got the hang of it. Not that you can’t ...