LeanKit Blog

Since our 1.0 release in February, the LeanKit team has been working hard releasing multiple major and minor releases of functionality and system capabilities. With these new capabilities has come some neccesary and unneccesary overhead to the system. Coupled with the fact that our customers are mapping more and more complex value streams and processing more and more work items, we have had many reports of poor performance when performing even common actions. We took this feedback to heart and have spent the last two and a half weeks comcentrating all efforts on optimizing the application, particulary focusing on Board related activities. We set very aggresive goals, and we feel that we have achieved some impressive performance improvements.

Part of this effort involved simplifying the html, css, and javascript that renders the cards and lanes on the board. You’ll notice some of these changes in the appearance of the lane headers and in the size and shape of the card itself. Part of the reason for changing the card shape was for simplification, but it was also part of our future plans for improving the amount of information that can be seen on the card without actually opening it. Look for more visualizations and shortcuts to information about the card to appear over the next few months, as we implement some of these ideas.

Even with these tremendous improvements, we are still seeing less than desirable performance in Internet Explorer 7. LeanKit Kanban depends on strong JavaScript, CSS, and DOM rendering performance to provide a rich, responsive experience in the browser. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer 7, still used by many of the Web's users, has not kept up with other modern browsers in their support for web standards and performance. Compared with other browsers, the JavaScript performance is many times slower. IE7 although markedly better than the infamous IE6, still contains many CSS quirks, bugs, and layout limitations.

But we do not want to leave our customers that use IE7 behind. Therefore we have researched and tested the application running in Google Chrome Frame, a free browser plugin for Internet Explorer from Google. This option allows our IE7 customers to experience the application with all the goodness of a modern web browser including the the improved responsiveness, standards, and features that the new browsers provide

We will continue to look for ways to improve the application's performance as we continue down our development roadmap in the months ahead. And we will continue to pay close attention to feedback from our customers. Please contact us at any time with your feedback, opinions, and suggestions.

Chris Hefley
CEO and Founder
Bandit Software, LLC
http://LeanKitKanban.com

Over the weekend, we deployed some bug fixes and some little niceties we’d like to point out to our users. First of all, we fixed some bugs and some UI funky-ness that caused lane heights to be a little off at times. I think you’ll see that they line up much more nicely now, especially on the more complex board layouts. We also found a (related) issue, where dragging cards into some columns was a little clumsy – forcing you to drag the card over just the perfect spot in the lane to get it to drop correctly. Again, this happened mostly on the more complex board layouts, where horizontal swimlanes were involved. This should behave much more smoothly now.

Whiteboard Skin

On the options tab on the board, you’ll now see that you have the option of turning off the “whiteboard skin” around your board. The borders that look like a marker-board and the shadows under the card that make it look like a sticky note can now be turned off, giving you a little more screen real estate and a more “flat” look.

Usability Improvements

When adding a card, you now have a button for “Save and Add More” that will save the current card, and keep the dialog open for you to add more cards. The title and description fields will be cleared, but the Type, Priority, Assigned User, and “Into Lane” fields will remain the same as what you selected for the previous card. This is just a simple way to remove the need for a few extra clicks when adding multiple cards at one time. Look for more such “usability” improvements in the coming weeks, and don’t forget to log your suggestions and vote on others at our forum at http://leankittools.uservoice.com.

You’ll also notice a much nicer-looking History tab in the card details, styled to be easier to read.

Board Viewers

We’ve also introduced a completely new feature, the ability to add “Board Veiwers” to your account, and to allow them view-only access to a particular board. This is designed for medium-sized to larger organizations that would like to expose thier kanban board to a wide audience within the organization without having to purchase a full seat license for every single read-only viewer. For example, we’ve had requests from users that need 30-50 seat licenses, but would like to allow their entire organization of 200-300 people to view the team’s progress on the board. Through our Board Viewers feature, this can be done much more economically. Board viewers will be sold at $1/month/user in blocks of 30 at a time, to any per-seat licensed account (the free and “Personal” account types are not eligible). Contact sales@leankitkanban.com to find out more, or to add board viewers to your account.