Collaborative Work Management with a Highly-Available Kanban Board

Abstract

Research group leaders and university vice presidents are responsible for tracking progress of many different projects at the same time. Kanban boards have turned into a surprisingly popular approach for project management over the last decade. Their usage spans the management of software development teams following an agile approach, business task management, and organizational development undertaken by collaborative teams. More recently, Kanban boards have also proven to be useful for personal task management. Users are required to break projects down into a collection of individual tasks. The visualization of these tasks (or a subset) helps to prioritize and focus on only a small number of tasks at a time, while tracking progress of their status. Software support for this type of task is highly desirable, but prone to data loss and corruption under concurrent updates. In this paper, we describe the functionality of software products that provide implementations of Kanban boards.We discuss how concurrent operations on these boards, such as moving entries on a board, can lead to unexpected and undesirable results. This type of bugs can be prevented by disallowing concurrent modifications of the application data. Using a formal model of a Kanban board specified in our verification tool Repliss, we show how techniques such as conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs) can improve the programmability of highly-available systems and where their limits are.