My colleague, Simon (aka The Agile Pirate), has written a post on his blog about how our team’s Scrum Board has evolved over the past year. Until I Simon’s summary, I wasn’t quite concious of how much we have achieved since January.

It’s probably worth supplementing Simon’s post with something about the aim of the ‘bigger picture’ sections of the board, which I was primarily responsible for instigating. One of the problems we had with the standard current-sprint scrum board is that the team wasn’t always aware of where they were in the bigger scheme of things. This meant that there seemed to be a tendency to get bogged-down on a particular feature or story, and lose sight of how it fitted with the rest of the release. The was a particular problem on the ANTS Performance Profiler 8.0 project, which was a longer duration than many of our normal projects. Ensuring we had a visible record of what’s coming in future sprints meant that the team kept this focus better.

The Project Plan sheet that I had developed by the October photograph is an attempt to clarify our goals and objectives a lot better, helping the dev team to take informed decisions about the value of any particular task. I’ll blog about the rationale behind the design of that page another time.

Read A Year of Whiteboard Evolution on The Agile Pirate.