Wednesday, December 15, 2010

The Ultimate Wall Board



What’s on your wall board? Atlassian ran a competition for the ultimate wall board. Ole Højriis Kristensen from the Vodafone web team won the competition by integrating a physical Scrum board with Atlassian’s JIRA/Greenhopper issue tracking/PM tool.

Ole’s solution keeps the physical board in sync with their project management tool. He setup a printer below the scrum board. Whenever a new story is added to JIRA, a card is printed out with a reference to the JIRA ticket number. This receipt is then placed in a plastic card that has an RFID and a magnet and then the card is placed on the board.

Whenever a developer is ready to work on a story, the developer swipes the card and moves it to the next column. They also have avatar cards for each developer that they swipe to indicate who is assigned to the story. Any card movement on the board automatically updates the corresponding story in JIRA. A camera snaps a picture of the developer that is moving the card and it is attached as a comment to the JIRA issue indicating who modified the ticket. The board also kicks off the build/deploy process for stories that are ready for testing and sends out tweets to inform the team and QA. There is also a projector that continuously displays burn down charts and velocity from JIRA data.

Even when an issue is updated directly through JIRA, the board constantly reminds users (via voice prompts) to move the corresponding card to its correct position!

Additional awards were given to a couple of other boards. Check them out at http://ultimatewallboard.com/