Virtual Story Wall for Distributed Teams
So, when it comes to using a tool for Story Wall (read it as Agile PM tools): My first reaction is, you don’t need them unless you have used physical story wall (task boards) enough that you understand their limitations and you want to evolve.
If you are a small, co-located team, it is just simpler to use a physical story wall backed with a wiki or a spreadsheet. As the team grows (smell something is wrong), you might want to break down the large team into smaller self-contained (cross-functional) teams and continue using the same practice at 2 levels.
- Team Level: Each team manages the user stories they are working on.
- Meta Level: At a meta level, we manage the features (epics) each team is working on.
This scales fairly well.
For distributed teams, I’ll use the following approach:
- Start using Physical Story wall at each location backed with a wiki or a spread sheet. How the story wall is used really depends on how the work is distributed across teams.
- If all the development and testing is taking placing in one location (offshore), then I would only use one story wall at that location.
- If development takes places in both location, I would duplicate the story wall on both sides and during the “one-on-one standing meeting” (not a distributed stand-up meeting, I don’t think they work), each side updates their story wall with updates from others side. This ensures both sides are really collaborating.
- And sometimes, teams can maintain their independent story walls and then sync up once a week.
- One needs to figure out what works best for their situations.
- Once the team understands and matures using this. Next step could be to do away with the physical story wall in each location and just use a Wiki or a Distributed SpreadSheet (something like GoogleDocs) to maintain their backlog and story wall.
- If you belong to an organization where everything has to be “enter-price” class, then I might consider one of the following tools:
- Mingle from ThoughtWorks
- Silver Catalyst
- Jira and GreenHopper
- VersionOne or Rally
- And so on…
You might ask, what about tracking, planning, project management dashboard (fancy charts: burn-downs) and so on. Well, IMHO a lot of it is hype. You don’t really need all of that. You need some of them and its simple to generate them without having to use a heavy weight tool that adds more complexity than it takes out.
At one point, I really wanted to try out a tool for distributed teams. There was nothing good available at that point (2004), so I wrote one myself using RoR. The tool was fine, but it was very difficult to get the same feel as real story wall. So I dropped the tool and went back to physical story wall (this was a distributed team).