Scrum Boards & Agile Walls

These are a type of information radiator that are updated every day.  They are used by an agile team to visualise their work and progress, and increase transparency which enables people outside of the team to self-serve for insights and updates.

Historically this may be a combination of a physical wall with a whiteboard and post-it notes and a TV/monitor displaying dashboards from tools such as Jira, Confluence, Azure Devops etc.  In the era of hybrid and fully remote working, the physical aspects of the wall have become problematic, and so too has the effectiveness of information radiators.

So what might you see on a Scrum Board / Agile Wall?

You will almost certainly see a variation of a scrum board or kanban board showing the work to be done, work in progress, and work completed in corresponding columns.  But what else?...

Velocity - Best indicator of future progress

• Past trends and ranges (historical velocity).

Context - What we are doing, why and how ready we are

• Product Vision or Product Canvas

• Some form of Roadmap, Release Plan or Story Board

• Product Backlog Health (Average size of stories, no. ready to play, ratio of defects and tech dept etc.)

Current Iteration - A Time-box, a feature or next main release

• Burnup

• Top Risk / Issue

• Date of Last and Next Release

• Sprint Goal / Focus of current Value Generation

Release Content & Release notes - Be clear and be proud of your contribution to the business and your customers

• Product Owner & Team owned

• Be clear on the type of business value being created

Automated Test Suite (Regression, Smoke, Acceptance etc.)

• Last run

• Score

Also, this article (VFS Main Website) may be helpful.  It describes the key aspects of highly effective daily standups, of which the team's own scrum wall, or more specifically the information that it should contain, is one aspect.

Below is an example of how we've depicted key Product Backlog items next to the sprint board on our scrum wall: