An idea about developing an agile wall web tool

Question

Hi folks,

I'm thinking about developing a web app to visualize the agile wall. The reason is that the project I'm working in has multiple distributed teams, so it is very difficult to share the information on the agile wall across the teams. I know some tools like JIRA do have agile wall functionality built in, what I want to have is a dedicated agile wall web app which could potentially integrate with those popular project management systems.

Does this idea sound sensible and interesting to you? Please let me know if you get better idea about sharing the agile wall across distributed teams.

Thanks. John

Answer 1

Have you looked at Mingle from ThoughtWorks?

I haven't looked at it recently, but I'd expect it to be open to integration with other systems.

Even if you end up wanting to write your own, you should look at Mingle to see what a similar system looks like.

Answer 2

I'm not sure how well the card wall translates to a small screen. I've seen one similar implementation of something like this (www.cardmeeting.com) that I was not impressed with. One of the drawbacks to it is that the cards are unreadable until you click on them. That being the case, the tools used by most commercial vendors to capture stories at least the advantage that you can immediately see the titles on the stories even if they don't implement the wall format.

Another concern that I have is trying to take a passive information radiator and insert it into an active presentation medium. The wall format works partly (or even mainly, I haven't really looked at the research closely) because it's highly visible but not intrusive. Whenever you see it you get an immediate snapshot of the current state of the project. Translated into a web browser, you lose this aspect. It's not clear to me that in an active medium, where users need to navigate to information rather than simply absorb it, if the wall is still the right tool.

Answer 3

Take a look at Simple-Kanban. All done in a single HTML file.

Answer 4

Before you start implementing your own tool, take a look at:
http://www.userstories.com/products

I'm sure you can choose something appropriate :-)
Guess which one is ours...

Regards,
Marcin

Answer 5

Bright Green has a good kanban virtual wall: http://www.brightgreenprojects.com