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:
