When you have a project consisting of more than 5 tasks, the most convenient way to organize is to use some kind of task board. All agile teams know that probably quite well. One of our favourite solution used in not only Scrum based projects is Jira tracking software with Greenhopper add-on.

Task board in Jira with Greenhopper

That rocks – you can simply drag and drop cards with tasks and mark them appropriately. One of the drawbacks is the level of Jira complexity. A lot of people are afraid of the system at the first sight. However once you get used to use it on the daily basis, you simply cannot live without it. Perfect for agile teams.

Recently I’ve had a chance to try simpler approach and closely related to Scrum methodology. There is new application available called ScrumNinja (http://scrumninja.com/). ScrumNinja beats Jira in simplicity and readable user interface. Similarly you can drag all cards and update them when necessary easily. The status of the project is also clearly presented to all involved parties. The only drawback, which I found is the pricing – having 60 users on-board in our company, we would have to pay almost twice as for Jira system. However the hosted offer is quite reasonable and worth considering. Especially if you are working on open source project – they are hosted for free. That might be an interesting solution.

One of our team is working on couple of projects in parallel for the same customer. For some projects we are using Jira, but we also need to use external separated tracking applications. That makes the life harder and having the summary of on-going tasks can be really difficult. We worked out that real task board might be an effective solution. Take a look at our proof of concept below :)

Real world task board - our proof of concept

Yes – quite colourful :) This is one of the features. Differently from other Scrum teams, colors indicate projects – each project has a separate color. Each team member has its own subsection within “In Progress” area. We are updating the task board on the daily basis during our morning stand-ups. Once a week we are removing all Done tasks and add tasks, which are planned for another week. It is not a secret, that we got inspired by Roy’s ideas. And it works especially good for environment, where sprints cannot be synchronized among different projects.

Our idea was to start using it quick and easy. One might say, that it is not perfect and there are so many things to improve in the process. I say – OK, let’s do it. If somebody from our team sees, that it might be improved, than it is great. The idea is to start implementing useful tools quickly and improve (refactor) the approach learning from experience. So we liked our proof of concept and now we have it even bigger (since the team is getting bigger as well :) )

Task board refactored

It’s the end of the week today, so some of us need to finish a lot before the weekend ;)

It is big, visible and effective. One more thing – it is fun to be able to do something in real world. When sitting 8 hours in the Matrix, it is good to stand up and be able to move your card from In Progress to Done. It motivates a lot :)

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Everybody wants to work good and efficiently. Even very good. When you sit in the office for eight hours and you have a job that you don’t hate then for sure you want to do it well. You want your code to be well written, you want to be proud of your application and of everything that you’ve done. Nobody wants to write poor code.

Of course there are exceptions from this rule but I hope you don’t have those people in your team yet.

You think that writing the best code in the world and fixing every possible issue you find is the best you can do. I agree that it would be perfect if it could be like that. But one thing we always forget when we are doing another refactoring and another layout improvement is the client. The client and the businness.

The reason why we still have our jobs is because our clients pay us for sitting and coding. Client has money to pay us because there are other clients that spend some money for using application we have developed. And I’m 100% sure they don’t care about the refactoring, methods names and code quality. They want to have application working, they want some new functionality that will help them in their lives. And nothing else.

I always ask myself a question: if I was the client would I pay so much money for something that won’t make any money for me but it’s just a code change that developer would like to do because he likes it and he thinks code will be well-written? I would rather spend $100 for something that will bring me another $100. Or more.

We’re here not for fun but for making money for our clients. I’m sure most of PGS developers finally understand that.

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We are agile in PGS Software. We are so agile that we want to make all our client agile. Our main project management methodology is Scrum. 10 of us have even proper certifications – thanks to them we can call ourself “Scrum Masters”. But I do not want to write about Scrum here but about the problems and solution when you are offshore or nearshore IT company.

We know that the best solution is to have agile walls… on walls… but it is very hard to share such wall with client or with other teams. That is why we had to decide, some time ago, how are we going to resolve this problem.

We tried many tools that support agile… good (Oscar goes to!), bad, and those that you can only compare to category B horrors. But because we are very happy with Atlassian’s Jira (check our Jira here – just in case, you think I can lie), we started to look for a solution that would allow us to still use Jira, but additionally it will simulate famous Agile Wall – but wall that can be shared among more than one team.

And here it is, I can proudly present the best PGS friend for last 2 years: GreenHopper!

Check it out it is really great tools and GH team is doing great job. It is better and better with every new version and it integrates with other great tools e.g. Balasmiq.

I will prepare more information about our tools soon and some more (hot!) information about Scrum Master life.

Come crawling faster
Obey your Master
Your life burns faster
Obey your Master
Scrum Master

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