Task boards (virtual and real)
Posted March 12th, 2010 in Developers by Bartosz JablonskiWhen 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 :)
Tags: agile, project management, scrum, task board, tasks tracking
Real task board not only might be an effective solution, is a really good effective solution. Where i work now we use this option widely from long time and it’s works perfect. Each team has own real table with cards (each team has specific colors of those cards for scenarios,tasks bugs, etc.) and during scrum meeting cards are moving in accordance with work progress.
Additionally we have also paper version of burndown/burnup chart which is updating each day in sprint iteration.
Scrum meeting than looks different and people have more fun with those cards and each can express yourself in real
world. I think this all about in a scrum philosophy.
Best regards,
Tomek.