Over a range of projects that have been based around user stories, I have seen a number of different means of story management, including XPlanner, Mingle, spreadsheets, Pivotal Tracker and index cards. Each of these has good and bad points (some more than others), but I've come to regard index cards blue-tack'ed to the wall as the simplest and best option.
The major factor is visibility: regardless of what lanes you use, it is close to instant to view where each story is at and who is working on what. Compare this with logging onto your web-based story management tool (you remember your password/have enough licenses don't you?), selecting the right project, applying a few filters, removing the lanes you aren't interested in and hopefully getting a view of the current iteration.
Of course, you still might want to use a tool for history, backups or to share across team sites. I know of one rambunctious manager who likes to wander around project rooms silently removing random cards from stories walls, just to see what would happen!
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I totally agree Pete. Tools like Mingle feel like a more sophisticated, feature rich solution, but when you're using it day-to-day it's so much quicker and easier to just use index cards. The only situation I could see a web based story wall being a big advantage is if you had a distributed team (members sitting in different locations) which we all know is terrible for communication but sometimes unavoidable.
ReplyDeleteIf traceability is the only thing you get with a web story wall, then I don't think it's worth it. Product owners have a good idea of what they want, if there's no card for something (or it has been taken off the wall) they'll write another card. Also, I loose a lot more card in Mingle than using a story wall, with the convoluted combinations of filters and views; and that's without anyone purposefully removing cards.
I think the most effective way is to have the physical wall.
ReplyDeleteI think Mingle etc. are/can be great tools, however like you said Pete its all about visibility. Unless these tools start making it drop dead simple to view "the wall", a physical solution will be the winner.
I think a wall should be mandatory and the driver for work, and use the software-based solution as a means of traceability. When the work is driven from a software-based solution the physical wall gets out of sync, becomes neglected and a more of a nuisance than anything else. I find this happens frequently on site, and most of the time the software solution used isn't tailored to agile anyway. Messy!