Card Wall + online card wall = duplication?

Question

I'm not a great fan of duplicating effort. I do find, however, that there are benefits to tracking agile iteration progress on both a physical card wall and an online "calculator" (Excel, some scrum tools) or an online card wall (e.g. Mingle).

I find that a physical card wall in the team space provides a visceral kind of connection to the status of the cards... and that moving a card physically when you finish something provides a level of satisfaction that can't be duplicated online. I can feel the card... and people can see me walk up to the wall to move something.

Online tools provide great capabilities to share remotely and to calculate progress (e.g. in Mingle, you can use the built-in tools to automatically calculate burn-ups or burn-downs from the real data, saving lots of administrative time in doing those things manually).

I'm curious if agile practitioners maintain two tracking media like I do, and how do you present the benefits of the physical wall to those who say "I can do it online... why would I want to do it on a card wall instead?".

Answer 1

Cross link your online and card wall.

Set up two way replication. Method is left as an exercise for the student.

Also handy to catch whiteboard content from discussions.

Answer 2

We use both, and I can't imagine doing it any other way. Part of it may be that we find our "online card wall" a little too clunky to easily maneuver, but we use the physical cards for getting a quick idea of what developers are working on, letting QA know which cards are ready for testing, and for QA to post what is ready for our weekly demos. The dev area, QA area, and ready to demo areas are three physically distinct places, with the ready to demo being most easily accessed. We also use the physical cards for final scoring.

Could we do all of this online? Yes, would it be quicker, and easier? No way!

Answer 3

I feel the same. There is something very psychologically satisfying in moving a physical card around on a wall. Thinking managerially, we like stats and we like them to be automated as much as possible.

Perhaps you can keep both? Use the physical wall as the main daily source of information your team work from. Then, assign one person (e.g. the scrum master) to take down the live status and put it into Mingle/Excel at the end of each day.

As long as there is good benefit for the users to have both, then you should find both keep happening alongside each other nicely. Find out what the motivators are for each tool. For example:

Physical wall:

• Instant reaction
• Quick visual
• Physical satisfaction

Online records:

• Really really useful statistics
• People can be rewarded against the stats in there (e.g. points completed)

Hope this helps.

Answer 4

My team has struggled with this as well. Electronic data makes analysis and reporting very easy and enables associations of checkins with a backlog item, but its a lot easier to manage cards during the standup. Plus, it's a lot easier to get a "5000 foot view" of the project from looking at a large wall than a small monitor.

No matter what you do you're either either going to have some duplicate effort, or you're going to have a process with some pain points. The goal is to find that balance between the amount of duplicate effort and the value that it affords.

We're still working on finding that balance :) Here's what we do:

• During planning, we throw everything into OneNote. Formatting is a bit of a pain, but we're getting better.
• After planning, our ScrumMaster enters the data from OneNote into an Excel document for generating our burndown. He then exports this data into TFS, for associating checkins, and does a mail-merge to print each task on a label which is then affixed to a post-it and added to the wall.
• During the standup we move the post-its around on the wall.
• After the standup, the ScrumMaster updates the Excel doc, generates the burndown update, and sends it around to the team.

As a team member this is pretty low-friction, but it's pretty wasteful of the ScrumMaster's time.

Answer 5

I greatly prefer Cards on the wall for a few simple reasons:
Everyone know how to use them. No software training required.
Not subject to problems with network, someone's computer needing maintenance etc., even in a blackout, people can still update their cards. This may sound like a joke, but can be nice to have something to do when for whatever reason yu can not use your PC
Programmers can freely update the cards while they are booting up/compiling
Easy to see them all at a glance
Ideal for meeting if your in a scrum environment and having amini meeting aroudn a desk.

I like jotting a note on the card when it's moved with time and mover... for trakcing bugs/features.

Answer 6

We've abandoned using cards after the sprint planning session (they get added to Rally) because it doesn't make sense for us to track in multiple places. Our scrum master is accountable for making sure people enter their tasks appropriately and move them (that's what the daily standup is for). The 5000 foot view is much better in an online tool than a bunch of cards on a wall that can only be categorized two-dimensionally (or maybe three if you stack enough on top of each other).

Answer 7

We use both a card wall and ProjectCards. It's painful for me because I sync the two of them, but it's worth it to have the feedback for the team that is local.

We've bandied about the idea of getting a large touch screen, but I still would rather have physical cards. The other idea I've been toying around with is having a printer which will automatically print out an index card whenever a story is added to ProjectCards.

Answer 8

Many of our customers says that our approach is very similar to physical taskboard and thus they don't need them. All team members are immediately notified about the changes, story cards can be colored too. Different views on the backlogs are very usable to know the status. Another advantage are easy accessible and automatically calculated Burn Down and Burn Up charts.

To be honest, I'm product manager of ScrumDesk

Answer 9

I was just wondering. How about a giant projector based touch wall. ;) Best of both worlds. This might give some pointers. http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/

Answer 10

Theres something very good about a big wall everyone can always see. I think we need a way to print onto regular thick index cards but I've had no luck so it is duplicated effort at the moment.