Training for Scrum Task Board Use

The following Scrum topics are available:

Task Boards

I’ve written in a couple of places about how I like to use a task board during Scrum sprints (iterations). The task board shows all the work we’re doing during a sprint. We update it continuously throughout the sprint–if someone thinks of a new task (“Test the snark code on Solaris 8”) she writes a new card and puts it on the wall. Either during or before the daily scrum, estimates are changed (up or down) and cards are moved around the board.

Generically, the task board looks like this:

A generic task board. Click to enlarge.

Each row on the task board is a user story, which is the unit of work I encourage teams to use for their product backlog product backlog. During the sprint planning meeting the team selects the product backlog items they can complete during the coming sprint. Each product backlog item is turned into multiple sprint backlog items. Each of these is represented by one task card that is placed on the task board. Each task card starts on the task board in the “To Do” column. The columns I always use on a task board are:

Story–The story description (“As a user I want to…”) shown on that row.
To Do–This holds all the cards that are not done or in process.
Work In Process–Any card being worked on goes here. The programmer who chooses to work on it moves it over when she’s ready to start the task. Often this happens during the Daily Scrum when someone says, “I’m going to work on the boojum today.”
To Verify–A lot of tasks have corresponding test task cards. So, if there’s a “Code the boojum class” card there is likely one or more task cards related to testing: “Test the boojum”, “Write FitNesse tests for the boojum,” “Write FitNesse fixture for the boojum,” etc. Some task cards don’t often get corresponding test cards (“Fix Bug #321 in Bugzilla”) so those are placed in the “To Verify” column.
Done–Cards pile up over here when they’re done. They’re removed at the end of the sprint. Sometimes I remove some or all during a sprint if there are a lot of cards.

Optionally, I sometimes use the following columns depending on the team, the culture, the project, and other considerations:

Notes–Just a place to jot a note or two
Tests Specified–I like to do “Story Test-Driven Development,” which means the tests are written before the story is coded. I’m not a stickler about it but it does help when there’s time to specify the tests (at a high level) in advance. This column just contains a checkmark to indicate the tests are specified. Ideally, not a lot of work (in the form of task cards) crosses this column without a checkmark in it.

Here are some photos of actual task boards in use. Click on any to enlarge.

A task board hanging in a team room.

Cork board hung on the wall.

A metal task board with cards placed with magnets.

A task board made with black tape on a large wall-sized cabinet. There's food in the cabinet!

A distributed team using Outlook's notes facility on a shared desktop.