{"id":104,"date":"2008-02-21T19:27:08","date_gmt":"2008-02-22T03:27:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/2008\/02\/21\/the-task-board-animation\/"},"modified":"2008-03-12T10:47:24","modified_gmt":"2008-03-12T18:47:24","slug":"the-task-board-animation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/2008\/02\/21\/the-task-board-animation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Task Board Animation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Task<\/a>When I do my “Quick Introduction To Scrum”\u00a0presentation\u00a0 the most popular feature is a little Sprint task board animation that I put together in PowerPoint.\u00a0 I got the idea from a slide from the ScrumMaster training that Ken Schwaber\u00a0provides.\u00a0 My main goal was to try to give a visual “time-spanning” representation of what a Sprint task board\u00a0“looks and feels” like over a two week Sprint that is operating in a more or less healthy\u00a0manner.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If you aren’t doing Scrum, but rather some other Agile methodology,\u00a0 just replace “Sprint” with “Iteration”, and “Scrum” with “Agile” and you’ll do fine.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I’ve converted\u00a0the animation\u00a0to\u00a0Flash\u00a0and added a little running \u00a0commentary\u00a0to cover\u00a0a few things about how we<\/p>\n

use\u00a0the\u00a0taskboard\u00a0where I work.\u00a0 You can see it at: http:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/Scrum\/TaskBoard.html<\/a>\u00a0– Please let me know if you find any mistakes or think of a cool way to improve it – I’d really appreciate it.\u00a0 [Thanks to Dmitry for suggesting the speed adjusting slider].<\/p>\n

Task board as a collaboration tool: <\/strong>The\u00a0task board is a powerful mechanism\u00a0for collaboration during\u00a0a Sprint.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0It is also very useful during the planning sessions before the Sprint, and the\u00a0retrospectives at the end of the Sprint.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The key value of the animation:<\/strong> The animation condenses a\u00a0two week iteration\u00a0(or any length you are using) into\u00a0a minute or less.\u00a0 This graphically demonstrates\u00a0how a task board can communicate the\u00a0health of the Sprint over time\u00a0as the task and story\u00a0cards\u00a0move across the board.\u00a0 This\u00a0“progress meter” feature\u00a0is hard to get a feel for just by looking at a photo or drawing of a task board.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Task board as progress meter:<\/strong> In actual use as the days go by the task board clearly displays when things are on track, and\u00a0it is a good feeling to see the task cards moving to “in progress” and “done” in real time.\u00a0 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”\u00a0column and a number of the task cards\u00a0will be in the “In Progress” column.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Fail-Early benefit: <\/strong>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.\u00a0\u00a0 This “fail early” or “early warning” feature is an important aspect of Agility.\u00a0 The taskboard\u00a0works best for this\u00a0when you can break each story into small tasks.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 We can’t\u00a0always break all tasks down to such a small size, but it is something to strive for.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Team member involvement:<\/strong> As tasks are accomplished they are\u00a0moved to the\u00a0“Done”\u00a0column immediately by the team member(s) who accomplished the task.\u00a0 We don’t wait for the next\u00a0stand-up meeting.\u00a0\u00a0 We don’t have the Scrum Master do it.\u00a0 As team members finish one task, they\u00a0move it to done.\u00a0 After that they will\u00a0review the board to see who is working on what – and where they think they can be most useful.\u00a0 Perhaps they will take on a new task, perhaps they will go help someone on an\u00a0task already in progress\u00a0where they can make things happen quicker.<\/p>\n

The stand-up:<\/strong> During the stand-up meeting the task\u00a0board is a focal point for verbal communication.\u00a0 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\u00a0by\u00a0using a task board than it is using a projector or printed sheets.\u00a0 With a task board the team members can point to things, move cards\u00a0to organize and group them to communicate relationships or dependencies, and write on the cards to capture details or ideas.\u00a0 The communication\u00a0happens very quickly and naturally this way.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The task board is also helpful in planning:<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n

A planning tool: <\/strong>Once the team\u00a0gets used to how a realistically “full” task board looks and operates during a sprint, it is a nice planning tool as well.\u00a0 (A full task board is one where we’ve defined all the tasks for each story we are committing to for that Sprint).\u00a0\u00a0Of course, we\u00a0get a reasonable feel for what we can accomplish\u00a0in a Sprint based on story points, but\u00a0our\u00a0level of confidence\u00a0in our guesstimate\u00a0is low until\u00a0we “task out” the stories.<\/p>\n

Sparking the collective genius in a planning session:<\/strong>\u00a0 The\u00a0candidate stories (those stories that are most\u00a0likely to fit into the Sprint) come to life\u00a0as we break out the tasks for each story.\u00a0 The type\u00a0of thinking and communicating across the team that happens at this point is the beginning of the collective\u00a0work that must continue throughout the sprint.\u00a0 \u00a0We start with the highest priority story and discover and discuss\u00a0the\u00a0tasks for that story.\u00a0 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\u00a0.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A visual indicator\u00a0that we have taken on an appropriate\u00a0amount of work: <\/strong>Once a story is “tasked out”, we estimate the hours for each task and\u00a0put the cards on the task board.\u00a0 Now we have a very clear indication of the size of the work for that story.\u00a0\u00a0 Obviously, since each task has different hours\u00a0the number of task cards isn’t a perfect\u00a0indicator, but\u00a0this isn’t a big problem.\u00a0\u00a0As we become good at breaking a story into tasks, we usually end up with a similar ratio of larger to smaller tasks for each\u00a0story, and all tasks are\u00a0relatively small, at least in ideal cases.\u00a0\u00a0What 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.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We might\u00a0have more\u00a0or\u00a0fewer stories from Sprint to Sprint, but it is the tasks and not the stories at this point in the process that shows us\u00a0how much work there is to\u00a0do.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0We tally up the actual hours to get a more precise figure, but this is really just a double check.\u00a0 We have the more “human”\u00a0indicator that we’ve reached our limit when the board\u00a0is tasked up like we’re used to seeing it from previous\u00a0Sprints.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The task board in the retrospective:<\/strong><\/p>\n

In looking back:<\/strong> During a retrospective the task board can be used to refresh our memory about the good and the bad of the past two weeks.\u00a0\u00a0We 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I do my “Quick Introduction To Scrum”\u00a0presentation\u00a0 the most popular feature is a little Sprint task board animation that I put together in PowerPoint.\u00a0 I got the idea from a slide from the ScrumMaster training that Ken Schwaber\u00a0provides.\u00a0 My main goal was to try to give a visual “time-spanning” representation of what a Sprint […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agile-stuff","category-extreme-programming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}