Our development team is expanding and we wanted to maintain clear visibility of what everyone is working on. Many agile development teams use physical post-it notes for this purpose, but I feel keeping these in sync, particularly when some people work from home frequently, is too much of a pain in the ass. We’re using the excellent Pivotal Tracker as our agile project management tool and so have opted to display its Story Board view (Google Chrome extension) on a big screen instead.
This is useful for a snapshot of current work items, but what about progress towards our longer-term release date? I wanted this to be visible to everyone as well, so I decided to alternate in the burn down chart every 10 seconds. This is achieved by opening another tab in Chrome to show the burn down chart, and using the Revolver Tabs extension to repeatedly swap between the two views. I also included the product backlog in this view so Accepted items are visible (they disappear off Story Board). For this Pivotal Tracker screen configuration I created a dedicated ‘Display’ user on the project with ‘view only’ privileges. We run it in full screen mode (F11) powered by a separate laptop.
Having both the story board and the burn down chart visible to the whole team throughout the day brings several benefits:
- Everyone knows what everyone’s doing and if we’re on track – the original intention.
- Developers get public victories – when a developer completes a task it visibly travels across the story board and moves the burn down towards its target. People notice, comment and celebrate this progress which makes the developers feel good and incentivizes productivity.
- Non-developers understand the backlog and implications of ad-hoc requests – as you can see from the picture, our current release is behind schedule according to the burn down chart. This being visible helps non-developers understand the time-pressure of existing tasks and allows principled re-organization and re-prioritization if new work needs to be done. Read: they’re less likely to bug you with incidental requests!
- It focusses the mind – having the imposing figure of the burn down chart with its target and trajectory constantly in your field of view encourages you to focus your energy on the important tasks that you know will move the line. You suddenly become very aware of doing work that’s not related to the current iteration, which suddenly needs to be a lot more justified than it did before. It also helps identify non-core tasks that can be delegated.
On top, it brings a bit of fun and healthy competition to the development process.
Tags: agile, dev, pivotal tracker
