Dan says: “Just for interest – I thought it would be interesting to see whether any notable patterns came out of it.” – Dan Heath

Sometimes at retro it’s hard to remember everything that went on during the iteration. And sometimes you don’t spot problems at the time they are actually happening. There’s just too much going on.

The brilliant Dan Heath set up a camera with a script which took a photo every 5 minutes and stitched them together as a movie.  The team can watch the iteration at retro and can see the cards moving (or not moving) on the wall. Where did they become blocked? Anyone remember why? Who took the last bit of cake?

Dan’s script stitches the images together into a month by month archive of activity on the board, and it only captures images during working hours, so you don’t get hours of spooky darkness.

He was happy to share his scripts. Here are the crontab entries, other scripts are available by email (although Dan warns they were done as a really quick hack job – “the nastiest hack I’ve written since uni”):

# ************* Crontab ***************
# m h  dom mon dow   command
*/5 8-18 * * mon-fri export DISPLAY=:0 && /home/robh/boardcam/vlc-cmdline/run.sh
1 19 * * mon-fri /home/robh/boardcam/vlc-cmdline/run_daily.sh

Spotted: LPOS development team