Feedback

Tag cloud

what's your question? be descriptive.

By: Asked

Agile Development Tools

What are the benefits of using software over a physical task board? Obviously if the team is too big or not collocated tools are necessary but what about for a team of 25 people working in the same office every day? Do the software tools tell me something my physical task board can't?

Add comment viewed 341 times Latest activity about 1 month ago

NN comments
or Cancel

5 answers

  • 1

bennett mcelwee

Software tools can

  • generate reports, such as how long tasks are taking and so on
  • provide easy links to other data such as automated build and test results and version control information
  • allow offsite access to people working remotely

But a physical story wall has some big, huge, overwhelming benefits

  • progress is easily visible at a glance to anybody who walks past
  • it encourages those crucial conversations by providing a natural gathering point for team members.
NN comments
or Cancel
  • 1

paul boos [ Editor ]

One additional benefit to an electronic system over a physical one, you do searches and trend analysis yes, but more importantly the items can be backed up and not lost, without double entry into an issue tracking system or other tool. Our huge Kanban wall is often having the stickies fall off, so it is very possible they could go missing.

NN comments
or Cancel
  • 1

steve conley [ Editor ]

I've had experience using both and always found software tools to be the answer. Incidentally, either will only be any use at all if the team commit to updating information. Could you trust 25 people to update that board religiously?

I find though that it is easier for someone to e.g., change the status of a story from 'In Dev' to 'Ready for QA' than it is for them to go and move a card on a wall and that way, it is more likely to happen. Our card wall ended up rarely getting updated and became totally useless, more of a hindrance. Bit of a shame really as mentioned already, the visibility they give is fantastic.

With the tools, you can get a snapshot that you can't get with the wall. The wall will show you a load of cards in columns for sure, but you don't get a nice burndown graph from it or a quick sum of the 'to do' points column for example. Right now I can look at our iteration in Mingle and see a pie chart which shows percentage of all the stages. I know inside a second that 5% of stories in this iteration are currently ready for acceptance.

NN comments
jonathan cogley
-
– we have experienced the exact opposite. :) The product owners on projects never seem to login to the software but they will stand in front of the board for long periods every day clearing impediments and reviewing progress.

There are also many benefits for the team. If someone gets up and is looking around the board, then you might ask them for help on your task or discuss status etc – just more collaboration.

There are also some nice physical limitations with the board since it isn’t possible to put 250 tasks in to “in dev” since the wall is only so big. :)

steve conley
-

Our biggest problem with the wall was that we had to also use software alongside it so people got fed up of duplicating everything. We have multiple locations so the wall didn’t give any visibility to people outside our office. When it was working well though, it was a good thing :–)

or Cancel
  • 0

jonathan.cogley

The consensus I have gathered from listening to various experts and even talking to tool vendors is: if your team is collocated (no remote offices) then just stick with a physical task board. The main benefits for going to a software solution is to allow remote teams to collaborate.

This runs counter to the nature of most software folks (we took about a year to get over the idea that we didn’t need a software tool) but it does make sense from an agile perspective since a physical taskboard is a simple solution.

NN comments
sadaansaeed
-

we were doing our scrum on white board before but the problem we had with that was in maintaining our backlog and planning sprints but now we are using this new tool YODIZ (http://www.yodiz.com) it is really nice and easy we can now plan our sprints easily and i love their backlog view .

or Cancel

Question's Contributors

Related Questions