Project tracking using a Task Board
A great way to provide visibility and focus to a sprint is by adding a task board to your team room to track the progress of each task for each story in the sprint. With a task board, the team can quickly see what is going on, who is working on which tasks, and how each story is progressing. The task board also provides a great focal point during the stand ups allowing the team to make sure they are working each story to completing and any additional tasks found during the sprint are called out, estimated, and tracked.
A sample story board layout is shown below:
There electronic version of the task board in most agile tools (like the one for Version One shown below) that work well for distributed teams, but I have found that when teams are located at the same physical location a physical task board works much better.
You can build the task board using a cork board and index cards, a white board with post-it notes, or any other office supplies that you find work for you. I like the cork board and index cards, often adding post-it notes for the ‘task cards’ and flagging who is currently working on a task.
The task board has a number of columns and rows. The first column is for the story card and each row represents one story. The second column holds all the tasks identified during sprint planning. The remaining columns represent the status of the task as they are moved from “Not Started / To Do”, to “In Process”, to “Ready to Test”, to “Done”.
The story cards have the short description of the story, the estimate in story points, and acceptance criteria (typically on the back of the card). The task cards have a description of the concrete task and an estimate, in hours, of how long the task will take. If a task card has a large number of hours estimated – it is probably a good candidate to be broken down in to smaller tasks.
Working Stories with the Task Board
As the team works on a story, each task card is moved from “No Started” to “In Progress”, when a team member selects that item to work on, they will physically take the task card or post-it note from one column and move it to the next. If new tasks are found during development of a story, a new task card is added to the board in the “Not Started” column. If a task is found to be un-necessary, it is removed from the board.
When all tasks are moved to the “Done” column, the story is considered complete, potentially releasable, and the team can move on to the next story. (Remembering that it’s best if the team can complete one story and then move on to the next to minimize the work in progress.)
Daily Standups and the Task Board
The team should focus on the task board during the daily stand up. All conversation and commitments discussed by the team should focus on the task board. Team members should be moving tasks while discussing what they are worked on, and are going to be working on.
Having the team focus on the task board helps keep the focus on the stories and tasks and gives the team a very visible reminder of the progress and if new work is being added mid-stream.
Note: I lost my photos of a team standing around the Task Board (I hope to take some more soon), but I did find similar ones – and some other handy tips – at the visual management blog. See ‘borrowed’ photos below:
Photo 1 – Team in a circle facing each other. Good conversation, but hard to keep up with what is going on. Somewhere just out of the frame, the scrum master is scratching notes as fast as he can so he can update the status on a spreadsheet that no one every sees. (Not the best approach.)
Photo 2 – Team facing the task board. Still have good conversation, but the focus is on the stories, the planned work, and the commitments made by the team. And, the scrum master doesn’t have to take notes; the team manages the status right on the board. (Can it get any better than this?)
Resources
As usual, Mike Cohen has a good description of this: http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/scrum/task-boardsand some additional examples.
