Turn That Board Sideways

We’ve been using YouTrack for our Agile Board. We are doing “scrumban” at the moment. We’ve customized our board heavily, with several columns, but it just isn’t working as well for us as we’d like right now; in particular, it isn’t easy to see at a glance where things are at. You can see stories, or you can see tasks, and there isn’t really a connection between them.

I decided to look up pictures of Scrum Boards. (I wish I could see real tasks on them, but, having just decided that I’d best not take a screenshot of our board, I understand why that is infrequent.)  One setup shows each row has one story, and then subtasks on it. That’s interesting. I’d never seen it done that way, and we ought to be able to set up swimlanes for that purpose.

This is the board that I’d really like to replicate [2 page pdf] but I’ve not seen a tool for distributed teams that lets you have two different sizes of cards like that. (We looked at many different tools. Believe me, I couldn’t stand Jira anymore; there had to be something better. The programmer in me wants to build my own tool (hey, I’d learn Unity UI a little better!) but I recognize that is a foolish idea.)

Hmm… What is this “Scrum and XP from the Trenches – 2nd Edition“? Sounds like more homework.

And then, here is an article that (briefly) takes things in a different direction. Skip down to “Orientation – Horizontal or Vertical”.  Wish I had the luxury to use a physical board, but I don’t see that working well with my distributed team.