Nito

Scrum Management: The Brain Dashboard

This post is a follow up to the original at the OnCast blog, regarding our dashboard creation, but before digging into the specifics, I would like to a summarize few goals we had in mind when we (as a team) come up with the current solution we use at our daily scrum lives.

First some background: we are a medium size team, composed of six developers working usually in pairs and doing sprints of 2 to 3 weeks on a project that is already in production, most of our stories are about improving the existing code base while adding some new functionality, and our sprints are usually composed of 20 to 30 stories, demanding quite some space on our dashboard.

A recurrent issue was some small bugs popping up during our client demo, giving them a bad impression about the quality of our code while bringing the team moral down.

Based on these we established some few goals to out new dashboard design:

• More flexibility: writing your name and status on a story/task is not a good idea, since whose working on it can change over time;
• Focus on people: enforce the team members importance on the project;
• A dashboard that would breathe quality: more testing and validation;
• Sense of accomplishment: it should be pretty visible to see when tasks/stories are completed;
• Pleasant to the eye, after all we will be using it everyday.
• Support a good amount of stories/tasks to be done and completed;
• Impose a limit to our WIP (work in progress);

The result is the following design, that according to Eduardo Moreira, resembles the way a brains operates, concentrating the most important things on the core of the dashboard:

On the top we have all the stories in a flow that goes from:

	To Do: At the beginning of the iteration it has the usual 20 to 30 stories ordered by the Product Owner priority. All the impediments are marked with a red flag, and work should not be started until it is unflagged.
	Work In Progress: When a team member starts working on a story it should be moved here. This step contains a much smaller space than the To Do and Completed ones, enforcing the team to work on the fewest stories at the same time, preventing too much unfinished work from happening.
	Done and Waiting Validation: After finishing all the tasks on a story it is moved here, where it waits to be validated by another team member whose do not worked on it. After validation, it then must be marked with a Success or Failure tag, the latter requiring a bug task to be created and placed on the Unexpected space (more on that latter).
	Completed: With the same space as the To Do, here is where all the completed stories lie, giving the team a good sense of accomplishment.

On the middle we have pictures of all the team members and their name tags to be stick on whatever they are working on (tasks, validation,…):

Lastly there is the bottom, with all the tasks split from the stories on our Spring Planing II:

	To Do: Not much different from above but divided into two spaces, a tiny one, to hold all the unexpected tasks (such as bugs) which wore produced during this sprint, and a bigger one, containing all the regular open tasks with the same red flags when suited.
	Work In Progress: Same rules as the stories, except that here the team member working on a task must mark it with his tag.
	Done: When a task is completed, it should be placed here. This step was created, to give the visible difference between work in progress and completed.
	Reported: Composed of all the completed tasks reported on the daily meetings.

These should cover most of it, but if you have any doubt or tip to help us improve our dashboard don’t hesitate on dropping a comment.