Peter Gfader's brain noise

Tips for working with distributed teams

The article has a bad title, but the tips are nice:

Putting the whiteboard in the cloud
Although a physical board with a co-located team wins
Make file sharing easy
Tools for video meetings

Full article
How to manage staff remotely
How to use your web and mobile tech to manage remote employees
http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/roundup/how-to-manage-staff-remotely-1080270

Digitize your physical board with QR codes

Nice job Jimdo people!

See the video.
http://de.jimdo.com/2012/07/03/besuch-von-mr-kanban-himself

Blog post in German.

Read this if your task-board is a mess

Interesting experience report on how to build a “better” board.

Features of a “better” board:

The board should represent our process of work
The board should clarify what we wanted to transmit
The board should be build and used collectively

Great quote

The board is the mirror of the team daily work

How we built our taskboard…
http://agilefeedback.blogspot.fr/2012/04/how-we-built-our-taskboard.html

BTW: GetKanban is a great game to experience Kanban and see a board in action

http://getkanban.com/

Digital Boards and Physical Boards »

19 minutes of a great discussion about benefits of Physical and Digital Boards

Interesting bits:

If you write something down, something in your brain happens that wires it “harder”
Highly visibility (Information radiators) versus “Minimizing a window”

Reasons for switching from a physical board to a digital board

Too much overhead to update real board??
Save paper??
Distributed team!
History??

Full article
http://integrumtech.com/2012/02/scrumcast-45-digital-boards-and-physical-boards/ http://integrumtech.com/2012/02/scrumcast-45-digital-boards-and-physical-boards/

How do you track Technical debt?

There are two types of technical debt:

Technical debt that you introduce on purpose: because of deadlines
Technical debt that you are not aware of: little known technology, being a lesser experienced developer in a new language,

If you come across Technical Debt, make sure to write that down somewhere.
I recommend Tobias Mayer’s approach on the task board.
Although I have seen people using

//TODO: Implement proper age calculation

as well, highly visible Information Radiators are winners!

**Information Radiators: large, highly visible display used by software development teams to track progress

agileanarchy:

Oh, Holy Task Board! — Gent, Belgium, 2009

I continue to believe the task board is the heart of Scrum. If your Scrum team is still using Version One, Rally, or another one of those other monster “management” tools, or even the newer, more lightweight tools, to track work, it is likely you are missing the real benefit—and joy—of Scrum.

I wouldn’t call the task board the “heart of Scrum”, but it is definitely the best visualization tool that you can have.