The number 1 reason people don’t like to use tools when it comes to scrum...

...is the all familiar task board. One of our consultants, Xavier Quesada Allue who we are working with on a number of projects, spends a good deal of his professional live advocating and optimizing the use of the visual task board. More information can be found on Xavier’s blog.

The number 1 reason people like to use tools when it comes to scrum...

...is that same task board. The reason is that the primary users of the task board are often not working on the same location. So a software tool like pmScrum can be of great assistance here.

The recipe for success to make the task board is to emulate as much as possible how it is used by real teams when doing it on the wall.

• Stories are shown on the left column. They contain the obvious fields like story points and business priority.
•  Tasks linked to the stories are shown on the right of the relevant story. They are shown in columns representing the states (open, ongoing, done, rejected).
• Also bugs and impediments are shown in this way.
• Users can drag and drop tasks, bugs or impediments in another column to change its state.
•  All members of the team are represented on top of the board. To assign someone to a task, the user simply drags a user on top of a task.
•  Tags representing things like “To Test”, “Clarify”,… can be added to tasks.
•  New cards can be added to the board using a simple drag and drop in the right column.

We believe adding this feature to our pmScrum tool, helps team sharing the work progress of the task board. If you are already using it, we’d like to hear from you what you love or hate about it.