Updating the Task Board

There are many techniques that help agile teams stay coordinated such as, Pair Programming and Scrum Meetings. However, one often overlooked yet vital component is the task board. Even in some scenarios where agile teams are implementing task boards, developers or other team members often will not always reflect all the work they’ve done onto the task board. Other members might not want to participate in initializing and organizing the task board. It is up the scrum master to help enforce that everyone is performing the proper task board procedure.

The task board modifications begin during the spring planning. The agile team will come to a consensus on the stories for the current sprint. After all stories have been created and agreed upon the agile team will then prioritize the stories from top to bottom (any order works, just make sure the entire team is on the same page). The next step is for the team is to create the tasks. Each task will be written on a sticky note (usually yellow) and should be aimed to resemble a day’s worth of work.

After stories and tasks have been created and set, no one should be updating the tasks except for the developers. When anyone has the authority to move and alter tasks, it becomes very hard for the programmer to keep up with what they are working on. At the start of each sprint the team will decide which stories it wants to complete for that sprint and generate the appropriate tasks in a to-do column. It is during each morning stand up that these tasks can be moved from the to-do column to the doing column. Another thing to keep in mind is that during each daily stand up every developer should be updating the board. This flow is generally easy to keep if the agile team is good about creating appropriately sized tasks.

Often developers will want to combine tasks, or just knock out an easier one after they finish a different task. It can be very tempting to think, ‘Oh that one is really easy too I could knock that out in 30 minutes tops’. The problem can occur when multiple developers adapt this same mindset and might all pick up the same tasks, without updating the task board. Another problem developers run into in this scenario is when tasks turn out to be more difficult than they thought, which happens a lot. One might think this extra task will just take up 20 minutes of their time. Two hours later they finish to find out someone else has begun working on it.

It is very important for agile teams to implement a good and meaningful task board to stay organized. However, just initializing a good task board isn’t enough. Agile teams must constantly update and reference their task board in an orderly and controlled fashion. It is good practice to never start working on anything new unless the task board has already reflected such a decision.

Work Cited:

"Agile at Work: Reporting with Agile Charts and Boards." https://www.lynda.com/Business-Skills-tutorials/Updating-taskboard/175962/452765-4.html. Accessed 27 Nov. 2017.

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https://manifesto.co.uk/agile-concepts-scrum-task-board/