Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Agility

When I do my “Quick Introduction To Scrum” presentation  the most popular feature is a little Sprint task board animation that I put together in PowerPoint.  I got the idea from a slide from the ScrumMaster training that Ken Schwaber provides.  My main goal was to try to give a visual “time-spanning” representation of what a Sprint task board “looks and feels” like over a two week Sprint that is operating in a more or less healthy manner.    If you aren’t doing Scrum, but rather some other Agile methodology,  just replace “Sprint” with “Iteration”, and “Scrum” with “Agile” and you’ll do fine. 

I’ve converted the animation to Flash and added a little running  commentary to cover a few things about how we

use the taskboard where I work.  You can see it at: http://zuill.us/WoodyZuill/Scrum/TaskBoard.html – Please let me know if you find any mistakes or think of a cool way to improve it – I’d really appreciate it.  [Thanks to Dmitry for suggesting the speed adjusting slider].

Task board as a collaboration tool: The task board is a powerful mechanism for collaboration during a Sprint.   It acts as a focal point for discussion about the work that is taken on and gives a real-time “living” measure of the health of the Sprint.  It is also very useful during the planning sessions before the Sprint, and the retrospectives at the end of the Sprint.  

The key value of the animation: The animation condenses a two week iteration (or any length you are using) into a minute or less.  This graphically demonstrates how a task board can communicate the health of the Sprint over time as the task and story cards move across the board.  This “progress meter” feature is hard to get a feel for just by looking at a photo or drawing of a task board. 

Task board as progress meter: In actual use as the days go by the task board clearly displays when things are on track, and it is a good feeling to see the task cards moving to “in progress” and “done” in real time.  At the end of the first week, about half of the task cards and at least some of the story cards will have moved to the “Done” column and a number of the task cards will be in the “In Progress” column.  

The Fail-Early benefit: And just as importantly, if things are not moving, the task-board provides a very graphic indication that something is wrong, and this gives focus on that specific item that everyone will notice.   This “fail early” or “early warning” feature is an important aspect of Agility.  The taskboard works best for this when you can break each story into small tasks.  When tasks take more than a day to accomplish, the cards become sluggish – they don’t move, and it isn’t clear that anything is getting done, or failing to get done.   We can’t always break all tasks down to such a small size, but it is something to strive for. 

Team member involvement: As tasks are accomplished they are moved to the “Done” column immediately by the team member(s) who accomplished the task.  We don’t wait for the next stand-up meeting.   We don’t have the Scrum Master do it.  As team members finish one task, they move it to done.  After that they will review the board to see who is working on what – and where they think they can be most useful.  Perhaps they will take on a new task, perhaps they will go help someone on an task already in progress where they can make things happen quicker.

The stand-up: During the stand-up meeting the task board is a focal point for verbal communication.  The stand-up is a time of alignment for the team, and it is much easier and natural to relate what is being worked on, what has been done, and what is left to do by using a task board than it is using a projector or printed sheets.  With a task board the team members can point to things, move cards to organize and group them to communicate relationships or dependencies, and write on the cards to capture details or ideas.  The communication happens very quickly and naturally this way. 

The task board is also helpful in planning: 

A planning tool: Once the team gets used to how a realistically “full” task board looks and operates during a sprint, it is a nice planning tool as well.  (A full task board is one where we’ve defined all the tasks for each story we are committing to for that Sprint).  Of course, we get a reasonable feel for what we can accomplish in a Sprint based on story points, but our level of confidence in our guesstimate is low until we “task out” the stories.

Sparking the collective genius in a planning session:  The candidate stories (those stories that are most likely to fit into the Sprint) come to life as we break out the tasks for each story.  The type of thinking and communicating across the team that happens at this point is the beginning of the collective work that must continue throughout the sprint.   We start with the highest priority story and discover and discuss the tasks for that story.  One discussion ignites another, and the thread expands and paths cross until we have clarity on what it really means to fulfill the work represented by the story card . 

A visual indicator that we have taken on an appropriate amount of work: Once a story is “tasked out”, we estimate the hours for each task and put the cards on the task board.  Now we have a very clear indication of the size of the work for that story.   Obviously, since each task has different hours the number of task cards isn’t a perfect indicator, but this isn’t a big problem.  As we become good at breaking a story into tasks, we usually end up with a similar ratio of larger to smaller tasks for each story, and all tasks are relatively small, at least in ideal cases.  What this means is that as the board fills up we can get a good visual indicator that we are nearing our capacity and taking on the right amount of work – the board will end up looking similar from Sprint to Sprint and we get better at sensing what is the right amount.   This way we can feel comfortable that we are tackling a reasonable amount of work and stop when we know we are pushing the limit. 

We might have more or fewer stories from Sprint to Sprint, but it is the tasks and not the stories at this point in the process that shows us how much work there is to do.   We tally up the actual hours to get a more precise figure, but this is really just a double check.  We have the more “human” indicator that we’ve reached our limit when the board is tasked up like we’re used to seeing it from previous Sprints. 

The task board in the retrospective:

In looking back: During a retrospective the task board can be used to refresh our memory about the good and the bad of the past two weeks.  We have been pretty intimate with those cards for a couple of weeks, and some of the scribbled notes or crumpled up edges of the cards remind us of some of the things we went through to get to the end.  If we’ve had a less than ideal Sprint (which most of them are) there are things we need to remember and discuss to help us identify things we want to work on in our process – and the task board can make the trouble spots very apparent, especially if there are unfinished tasks in the “in progress” column.   Hopefully we’ll more often see everything in the “Done” column, but even still, there could be lessons that were hard learned that we don’t want to forget about.