The project story wall is a means of managing delivery of an iteration by displaying each of the tasks for each user story on the wall and their current status together with who is working on it.
To set one of these up you need the following:
- A wall – don’t laugh they’re not always that easy to come by! This should also be in a suitable location to be visible to all those that need to be able to see it without providing access to those that shouldn’t if the project is confidential.
- A card for each user story.
- A set of cards for each task for each user story, also for the tasks that are not necessarily associated with a particular story but with the iteration instead (useful for this to be a different colour to the story cards so that they can be easily distinguished).
- A photo or similar for each member of the team. There should only be one of these for each team member as they should never be working on two tasks at the same time.
- A marker – With this you can create 4 columns.
These will be for:
- Blocked – Tasks/Stories that are blocked.
- To do – Tasks that are waiting to be completed
- Doing – Tasks that are currently being worked on
- Done – Tasks that are completed.
Once you have set up the wall you can add all of the tasks for the iteration onto the wall with a row for each user story. All of the tasks are initially put in the row for their associated user story in either the blocked or to do column. Blocked tasks are those that cannot be worked on yet.
The team member markers are put on the side. Then the team member can pick a task to work on and attach their card to the task card and add it to the ‘Doing’ column. When it is complete the task is put into the ‘Done’ column and the team member picks another task card to work on.
When all of the tasks for a user story are completed then the story card is moved into the Done column.
This process provides a real-time view of the progress of the iteration so that at a glance it is possible to tell how well it is going as tasks migrate across the board.