Posts Tagged Done
Card Equaliser
Posted by nthorpe in Lonely Planet Mobile Dev Team, lonelyplanet.com on June 13, 2011
Team says: “A cool way to visualise the output of each iteration.”
What to do with cards after an iteration is finished?
Tear them up? Spike them? Leave them on the bus?
How about turning them into a ‘card equaliser’?
The idea behind this hack is to give a visual representation of the cards signed off in each sprint.
The card colours represent bugs, features, BAU support and tech stories. By arranging them on a spare wall according to colour groupings it’s easy to see how many cards and of what type have been signed off each sprint. For example, feature cards, defects, and tech cards. And you can see how this changes over time.
It’s also immediately apparent whether the main activity has been skewed towards one area. It takes it’s name from it’s similarity to the display of a graphic equaliser.
Like this:
Just by walking past, it’s easy to learn a lot about this team’s work:
So.. what this board is telling me is …
… this team pumped out a lot of features in a short time then faced down some serious technical debt and some outstanding defects.
Here’s another card equaliser, this time from the Lonely Planet web site team.
Spotted: lonelyplanet.com website and mobile development teams.
Here’s another variant, from a different source. Might be useful if you don’t have a lot of space:
A card spike
Posted by fe in lonelyplanet.com on June 12, 2011
Katie's unicorn spike.
Katie says: “There’s something really satisfying about spiking the completed cards at the end of each iteration”.
Here’s another take on what to do with the cards once the iteration is complete – stick them on a custom-made giant spike and top it off with a unicorn!
It’s important for a team to recognise the progress that they’ve made over a series of iterations. Watching the cards rise higher and higher up the spike is satisfying and a visual indicator of how much work the team has done.
Spotted: lonelyplanet.com website development team
The Dead Card Cemetery – where dead cards go to die
Posted by fe in LP Content Desk on May 10, 2011
The LP Content Desk's Dead Card Cemetery.
Fe says: “That card might get zombied back into the backlog”.
Some cards just never seem to move up the backlog. They are always deprioritised to make way for something else. After a while it becomes apparent that they are never going to get prioritised, that there will always be something more important. But it can be hard to remove a story from the backlog – someone usually still holds that story close to their heart. It’s a good way of managing team members attachment to particular stories. It almost never happens – but if needed, a card can be brought back into play from the cemetery. It’s also a useful visual to show how many things that we think are really important at the time, actually become so unimportant that they never get done.
Spotted: Lonely Planet Content Desk
Agile Board Hacks 