work: agile ba cards kanban story cards theory of constraints toc
by toni
4 comments
on putting tasks on the story wall
Somehow it happened, the wall was full of cards, literally there was no more space for adding anything anymore. I didn’t count them but probably we had more cards this week than in the last 2/3 iterations summed up together.
I went mad, I started grouping them. Then I realized why I hated so much all those cards sticked on the wall: it seemed impossible to make it.
Putting tasks on the story wall is a very dangerous activity, basically you loose in the blink of an eye all your knowledge on the team work load and on the team todo and done.
A card is like a tile, the lanes on the wall have fixed size, it’s a constrain, it’s a choice, you cannot change the size of the smallest story while the project is ongoing, you will loose track of what’s going on.
Extending this then I thought about our bigger story cards, we are currently using three sizes, 1 story point (S), 2 story points (M), 4 story points (L).
In theory you may try having three different sizes of paper cards, probably in that way you will better understand the load on the wall, or even better try to split those huge cards in smaller ones, as much as possible (always good).
Putting tasks on the story wall using the same card format/color as stories is seriously dangerous, use a dedicated swim lane, group them or write a card that contains similar tasks all together.
Yep, +1 to this,
I did the same many times,
thanks for your comment!
Just wanted to add a good comment from JK that he posted on facebook:
and completing a task has no business value until the entire story is complete (if it does it should have been it’s own story). tracking them is an overhead that takes time away from the team and adds no value in itself.
[...] I’ve got a nice comment from JK on the previous blog post about the story wall and we talked a bit about our story walls [...]
I was on a project that wrote tasks on little stickies and attached the tasks to the story card with stapler or tape. This was a good activity to make sure tasks were considered during estimation but when the card moved, all the tasks moved with it. As an improvement, tearing off tasks when they get completed helps to show what is not yet done for the story. Even if the story doesn’t move yet, it feels good to tear off a task.