Category: task board

Burndown charts - It's not about staying below the line

June 13, 2009 by Jack Milunsky

Introduction
I recently participated in a Scrum development discussion thread on Yahoo Groups where one member new to Scrum asked the following: "Our burndown chart's remaining work line always goes up. As a Scrum Master, what do I have to do to make it go down?" This question, surprisingly, generated a lot of response from the community. I found it puzzling to see how adamant some were to introduce solutions to get the remaining work line to go below the estimated work line.

Our Story Board is Better Than Yours

May 25, 2009 by Janusz Marcin Gorycki

I have decided to take a break from my usual bi-weekly musings about high-level, theoretical subjects and devote this post to something more concrete. I would like to show you how our story board that we use for sprints looks like. This may be of interest to both newbies and advanced users. The former will have a chance to see how this sort of a thing looks in practice, the latter will be able to compare with their own story boards and share their opinions, praise or criticize (in a constructive manner of course).

The subject is also interesting because it gives insight into the evolution of our team, its dynamics, its priorities – I think it is safe to say that our story board is a reflection of who we are and what sort of a project we are working on.

Let me start with a disclaimer: this story board is not “by the book” – it is not exactly the type of board that is described in Scrum handbooks. It started that way. But over time it has evolved, mutated, adjusted itself to fit our needs. “By the book” solutions are good in theory only, day-to-day reality requires you to be more inventive than what “the rules” require.