Agile Task Boards
Posted on February 21, 2007
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Cognifide are an off-shore software development company that are working through the wrinkles of making distributed agile software development work effectively. One area that I’ve found that there can be no substitute is the daily task board that is comprised of sketches, index cards, post-it notes and the like. The task board basically reflects the current status within a sprint (or iteration) and is an essential information radiator for both the team and other interested parties.
When you go distributed you are sort of forced to move to an electronic form of daily task board to communicate with remote team members. Spreadsheets and other third party products lend themselves to this task quite nicely. However, if you do this, I recommend that you re-create the physical form of the daily task board at your local site.
Not only that, the physical form is really the master and you sync and distribute with the electronic form to keep the other participating sites up to date. Agreed, it is an overhead but we’ve found that the benefits outweigh the costs for intra day communications at a local site, particularly at the beginning of a project. As the team settles into a rhythm, you can then make a choice as to how often you update the electronic form. But the physical daily task board remains the master copy, not the electronic one.
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