Create a Kanban Board

Key Takeaways

What does a developer do day-to-day? Well, one thing I think you need to learn about is a Kanban board. I discussed them in my previous two videos, but we're finally going to get into the details. Stay tuned for more. Okay, so I do start my day by checking my emails and Slack. But, if those two things do not reveal any pertinent pressing issues, then I go straight to the Kanban board. A Kanban board is a workflow visualization tool. It helps you see the flow of where the application is at the current moment. So, I did not get permission to show you my work's Kanban board, but I do have two tools that I want to share with you to help you create your own Kanban board with user stories for your personal projects or to help you get started and learn about Kanban boards before your first job. So, we're going to create a Kanban board for Sniffs and Woofs, an application for dogs to meet other dogs in their city. Now, for the first tool I want to show you is Trello. Trello can be used for your everyday life to help you organize different to-do lists and tasks that you have, or it can be used for a Kanban board to help you organize your own application. Now, the syntax for a Kanban board is simple, and at its basics it's just eight to-do lists. You do to do, doing, and done. And those are your columns that are going to house your user stories. Okay, so a Kanban board is like a big to-do list. It helps you visualize that workflow and takes a user story from beginning to completed. So, we're going to create a Kanban board of our own. We're going to create it for Sniffs and Woofs. Oops. I want it to be public so that somebody else can join. And we're going to just going to do the bases of bases that you need for any Kanban board, and that is to do, doing, and done. That's it. Simple, right? So, then we're going to add user stories, but for the sake of this example, I'm just going to do something like epics. So, maybe you want to have somebody design the home page. You want to create that home page. Um maybe you want to have sign up and or sign in page. And then from our last video, we talked about having a profile page. All right. So, those are your user stories. Now, in Trello, I know that you can share with other users. The share tab is here and that helps you collaborate with other people. So, say I had other users and maybe Amanda was my designer, and she decided to design the home page. She would move that card to the doing lane because she is officially working on that user story. And maybe I'm the developer and I'm going to go ahead and create that uh home page. You do not need to have the designs to create the initial home page. You just want to have like the initial text and maybe the links that actually go to different places. So, we're working on those. Say 2 weeks or so goes by and um I've uh finished creating the home page and she's still working on the design. So, maybe I'm done with that part, but I may need to create another user story to apply those designs to the home page. So, that's part of the Agile. You want these user stories to be flexible so that you can um go back and make sense of what you have and make sure that you have everything in order. Okay, so that is the basics of the basics of a Kanban board. You can create it easily in Trello for any of your projects and it'll help you visualize that workflow for you and any teammates that you might have on your project. Now, I do want to point out that Trello does have some cool features. You can do what's called power-ups, aka add-ons. So, say you wanted to add on Slack. Also, there are developer tools so you can add GitHub features and I see that you can also add some readme or markdown features, which is a part of a developer's world. So, it you can add a lot of different things to help you through organizing your own projects and this is a great way to get started before you get your first job or just for any project that you may have. So, if this is making sense for you so far, go ahead and put coding like a boss in the comments below. If not, hopefully I will help you hash out those issues with the next tool that I want to talk about and that tool is GitHub. Okay, so Trello had a lot of great features. It was simple, easy and it can be used for any project that you might have as well as any life goals that you need to organize. But, specifically for developers, I think GitHub is a great place to house everything from your code to also using their Kanban board feature. So, we're going to go through that now. So, I'm going to go ahead and create, um, a project called Sniffs and hm and Wolfs. So, it's an app that lets your pets meet other pets in the neighborhood. I can't spell, guys. Neighborhood. It is public. I want to initialize it with readme, and we are going to create that repository. So, if you're not familiar with GitHub, GitHub allows you to save uh snapshots of all your code and allows you to go back in time if you make any errors, you can go back to a previous version and use that version instead of the one that's messed up. That's the simple explanation of GitHub. So, GitHub also has a way for you to make a Kanban board. You'll go up here to projects, and then you will plan your project. No. We're going to sort tasks. And we're going to create a project, sniffs and woofs. I'm not going to have a description cuz I feel like I've already described it. And we're going to add a column. So, this column is going to be to do, just like before. And then we're going to have doing, and finally done. So, this is just like Trello, simple and easy. And then you're going to go ahead and create the same user stories. So, we're going to create a design. We're going to create the home page. Um we're also going to create sign-in page. And finally, we're going to create the profile page. I want to point out that your Kanban board can get very big. For example, at my job, every application has to be 508 compliant. That means that every application has to be accessible to people with disabilities, and it needs to be able to be read by screen readers or any other tools that somebody with a disability might be using in order to view that application. So, I'm going to add that here. It's going to go between doing and done. So, we're going to say ready for 508. You can easily move any columns wherever you need them to be and then we're going to add doing 508. We're going to add pass. And one last one, oops. Sorry. We're going to add fail. Now, this is what I would see on my board. We have different kinds of views cuz we have columns that can be within columns. So, the main header would be 508 and then within that big column you would see ready, doing, pass or fail. So, this is part of the workflow because I will work on the user story and then I will pass it on to the 508 team. And that 508 team would have to go through the same process of doing to do, doing, pass or fail. And then once it goes from there, it will go to a whole 'nother team. It will go to the user acceptance testing and those people will make sure that that user test passes the criteria that you gave it. So, remember when I said that that last part of the user story is to help you test that um that task. That is for not only the developer, not only the 508 people, but for the users to test that user story to make sure that it follows the requirements that they need. Okay, so I just wanted to point out a few other features that might help you on your journey. So, we're just going to go through it a little just a little bit. Say that someone came in and they're still working on creating the signs. Say I came in and mine went through 508 or it's ready for 508. And let's just say another user passed 508 and they decided to move their card over to the done lane. Also, this done lane can be interpreted to ready for production. So, you're ready to push up that code to your production environment. Also, I just want to point out that you can have some interesting features so like creating a checklist. So, maybe this is redundant cuz this already a big old to-do list, but maybe you want to make sure that you talk to the product owner. And that's going to create a checkbox so that you can check it just as if it were a to-do list in this to-do list. Also, I created an issue just for this and you can add those issues directly to your board. So, you would go to add a card and you'll see this issue right here and you can Sorry about that. Add a card and add this to your board. There we go. So, now you know how to use the basics of GitHub for Kanban board purposes and you can house all that workflow into one place. Okay, so I really encourage you to get to know Trello or GitHub Kanban boards in more detail and to start using it for your projects. This will help you prepare for your first job or just have a better workflow for the project that you're working on. Be it real life, any goals that you may have, or specifically a project or an application that you're building on your own time. So, if you like this video, if you enjoyed it, and you want to come back for more, go ahead and hit that subscribe button below. I do love to see more of you. And also, I'd love to see you on Twitter and/or Instagram. So, if you enjoyed this video, go ahead, take some pictures of your Kanban board, some of your user stories, and @ me or #codinglikeaboss. All right, I'll see you later. Bye.