Scrum-board / Task Board and Color Coding

Question

What would you recommend as far as a good color-coding for use on a Storyboard?

Is this a good pattern from your experience?
http://maxheapsize.com/static/ScrumBoardCheatSheet.pdf
What is the most standard color-coding?

Answer 1

It looks overloaded to my taste. When I learned Scrum several years ago, the only color codes were white and red. The red stories were integration stories. If you get too many of those in the product backlog close to each other - you are in trouble. Anyway, I gave up using low-tech board on a very first sprint, because I had remote team members, so we used some electronic format - Excel, TWiki, VersionOne, Rally.

Answer 2

I suggest white for normal backlog items, i.e. those with business value, and red for bug fixes. This makes mistakes stand out and helps the team improve.

Start simple - as simple as you dare make it - and allow innovations as suggested by the Scrum team during sprint retrospectives. Only one innovation at a time; try it for long enough to see how well it really works; drop them if they aren't truly necessary.

Answer 3

Don't make anything fancy. Use common sense. I haven't used color codes, because I don't think they help much - they even make it more difficult for other stakeholders to understand the taskboard. This leads to less transparency. Otherwise I agree with Morendil.

Answer 4

I've seen the spectrum when it comes to card colors and breakdowns. Some teams use one card color because a task is a task is a task regardless of work involved. Other teams have colors for each type of task, which I kind of liked since it gave a nice view of the type of work left without having to read each card.

Story cards: blue Technical debt: green Bugs: yellow Analysis: red QA (not story QA, but tasks that QA's did outside of normal QA): white

This helped when we had a large team with a number of non-developers sitting around the table.