Post Holidays Update

During the holidays I spent a good amount of time working on the Kanban application, bringing it very near to being Minimum Viable Product (MVP) ready.

The only remaining blocking issue is the ability to re-order tasks and projects. That is close to working, but the last couple of weeks has been the 80/20 rule writ large. So estimating the exact timeline for completion is difficult.

Refining Pull Logic and the Overview

Looking back to when the pull logic came online, it prompted me to think more about how to incorporate pulling tasks with the Overview To Do List.

There seem to be two main options - either try to spread pulls across all of the projects, or prioritize somehow so that a single project is focused on for pulls.

Spreading pulls out might be easier to achieve, but could lead to unpredictable results for users.

Prioritizing a single project at a time, with clear and intuitive rules, would allow the user to make plans and have correct expectations.

My approach will be: Overview based pulls will go in order of the list of projects as shown in the sidebar. As long as a project is under its’ Work In Progress (WIP) limit, and has tasks to pull, that project would be the source of the next task. If it doesn’t have a strict WIP limit, pulls would continue until no tasks are available. Finally, when that project is either out of tasks to pull, or is at its’ WIP limit, then the next project would become the new source of tasks. And so on.

This won’t be in place for the MVP, but is a high priority for the releases after that.

Current State of the App

Briefly, this is where things stand for the app:

• The GUI is done for all of the initial views/dialogs/etc.
• The database is set up and working well, currently just using in-memory using test listings
• Moving from the storage database into the GUI, and back is working well
• Pull logic is in place per-board
• Adding, removing, and editing is in place for Projects and Tasks
• Drag and drop to re-order things within the same column works but is buggy, saving the changed order does not work yet

Screenshots

Screenshot of a test Board:

Screenshot of adding a new Board:

Screenshot of editing a Task:

Screenshot of a newly created Board:

Screenshot of a board with a newly pulled task (testing task 0):

Screenshot of the Board list after reordering (note Test Project 0):

Takeaways

I spent almost two days working on getting basic drag-and-drop working. The ability to sequence work is critical for the program’s goals, but the amount of time spent made me consider if I was being productive or not.

The sunk-cost fallacy is a real risk, especially when working independently. Taking time (ideally before work starts, but after a taxing issue too) to consider what your time/effort boundaries are and enforcing them will save time, effort, and stress.

There are rarely hard-and-fast rules for these things, but having a yardstick to judge against will hedge against the worst of fallacious thinking.

Next Time

Once drag-and-drop is working in one instance, it should be easy to expand to cover all columns so I’m optimistic all blockers should be removed by next time. If so, I expect to be testing to catch the most significant issues, or possibly have a MVP release. With that in mind, and following on the New Year, I plan to briefly reflect on the blog, and the Kanban project, and consider how to keep building momentum in 2026.

Photo Credit: Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash