The task board, the ultimate reason to migrate to an online tool

Submitted by: Frans Vanhaelewijck on 7 June 2010

Comments: 0

Since several years we are using, supporting and promoting Scrum. Scrum is a lightweight framework for project management. It is an Agile process framework that allows you to continuously direct your projects towards early delivery of real business value through the frequent and regular delivery of high quality software. Scrum has become an industry standard since the nineties. It is a project management method, not limited to software development.

The sprint is the new Unit Of Measurement

 

Functionality is delivered in iterative cycles of two to four weeks, called ‘sprints’. This allows you to get immediate customer feedback and to react to changing business opportunities, without losing the overall project overview.


Taskboard as central follow-up
 

The taskboard is the key follow-up tool where each piece of functionality to be delivered in the current sprint is split up in a simple user story. There are many fine pictures of real live project rooms all over the internet. You can find a nice selection on this post of Mountain Goat: http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/scrum/task-boards


OK, so how do we use this with a distributed team?
 

The short answer is: “you can’t”. I am sure someone already tried it with webcams, but it can’t have been very successful. In the same post, there is a nice sample of a team moving to some kind of shared outlook task view to share it across the team.


pmScrum’s taskboard
 

pmScrum is a collaborative project management platform that supports project teams endorsing the Scrum framework at the heart of their project methodology.
The taskboard is a crucial part of pmScrum. On a taskboard, stories are represented on the left most column, while tasks required to complete the tasks are migrated from Open, over Ongoing to the Done status.

 

 

The task board supports following features:

  • You can easily add new tasks to the task board using the drag & drop button. The tasks will be linked automatically to the corresponding story. When the task is dropped, the “Create New Item” pop-up frame appears to enter task details. With this feature, also stories can be created.
  • Users can customize their view so that the filters are applied to view a selection of stories and tasks
  • Tasks can be dragged across the board to trigger an update of their status
  • Completed tasks are shown in a different background color
  • Pop-up menus on the stories and tasks give quick access to common functions like ‘view attachment’, ‘postpone to next sprint’, ‘go to detailed view’,..
  • Pictures of the team members can be dragged on top of tasks to quickly assign them to tasks.

With the task board being available at all times using a standard web browser, the agile teams can succeed to make their information visible across the organization and across the globe for the distributed teams.

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Latest Comments

Robson Wolanski (not verified)
14 July 2010

Thanks for the post. I saw my day-by-day in a lot of sentences. We always need to get better on this way.

Rapidshare SE (not verified)
14 May 2010

For sure TenForce has a lot of benefits. The greatest one is that it helps to save time!