In my project we decided to use Kanban. We started with trello, the application is very nice but it has too few features. It doesn't support:
Which application can you recommend us to use? Are there any open source solutions?
I like whiteboards.
Corkboards are nearly as good, but harder to reflect changes in process on, IMO. While pinned index cards don't fall off as often as stickies, if your stickies are falling off you might want to look at how long it's taking to get them off the board in the first place.
I've also seen cupboard doors, table tops and windows suborned into the role. These also work well.
If you have no board, no wallspace, no cupboards, table tops or windows then I guess you could use LeanKitKanban or AgileZen. They're free for 1 user and pretty cheap for large teams. I don't know of any open-source solutions.
Otherwise... whiteboard is the way forward.
If cost is an issue for you, a decent open source option is kanbanpad
It is not as full featured as some of the other options, but it is free and I think it addresses your three concerns.
My company develops http://toolsforagile.com which is a visualisation based tool. It supports WIP limits, swimlanes, classes of service, due dates etc etc. You can take a look at the features here - http://toolsforagile.com/silvercatalyst/features/ (scroll down the page for the kanban features)
In a previous team, we used Jira with Greenhopper to track all development and most QA work in a team distributed across 2 continents & 3 cities. It worked VERY well, so I highly recommend you look into it as a possibility.
The nice thing about Jira is its workflows are very customizable - so even though it is designed to work for Scrum teams out of the box, I'm sure you can make it do the job for Waterfall if you really wanted to.
I recommend Eylean Board. It is fully configurable, you can limit WIP, add as many swimlanes as you need, provides various reports including Lead and Cycle time. It also has a great User Interface. Download free trial here.
