A s h l e y T e r n e s

(Suitability Note, this post is really aimed at folk who haven’t done Agile before – if you’ve already used a story wall then share your experiences)

No, a “Big Visible Plan” doesn’t mean a Gantt chart printed on A3 paper. Although such a thing might impart some information about a project, it doesn’t really help you work in a “Lean” way. Lean manufacturing relies on a “pull” of inventory through the system – only enough parts are stocked to fill the immediate demand for the output. Agile, uses this principle. For each iteration, enough work is planned for the iteration but generally not more (or less!). When it comes time to decide how much work to prepare, and when to prepare it a BIG VISIBLE PLAN, or a Kanban board is a very useful tool.

Kanban is a Japanese word that means “Billboard” and in Agile we know it as the story wall. The story wall shows us all of the work that we have planned to do in the current iteration. The work has been broken down into individual stories and prioritised. Each story can have only one of a number of states. We are currently using the following list for our story wall:

• Backlog
• In Analysis
• Ready for Development
• In Development
• Ready for Test
• In Test
• Ready for Showcase
• Complete

Stories can move forwards or backwards through this series of states but they can only ever be in one state. There are several good reasons why a story wall is useful for a team…

Visibility is the biggest reason. At any point in time anyone can look at the story wall and see what teams or individuals are working on. This helps communication and also keeps people motivated. Each time a story jumps a column you get to physically move a card and get that little bit of satisfaction. There’s a flip side to this – anyone who is “coasting” in the team will very soon become obvious. Overall this is a good thing but if your team currently has members who are used to cruising along at their own (slow) pace, this will show them up. Expect resistance if you are introducing a story wall under these circumstances.

Communication is improved – well, if you’ve already got up out of your seat to move the card then you may as well go and tell the testers that there’s something else in their “in box”.

The story wall self manages. With a functioning story wall the days of someone walking around (project manager or scrum master for example) asking individuals what the status of a piece of work is are over. This is covered more than adequately by the combination of the story wall and the daily stand up meeting. I don’t know a good developer who doesn’t prefer this to having someone ask them repeatedly what percent complete something is.