I know it's cooked by lookin' at it

My wife bought a nifty electronic fork that tells me the internal temperature of things on the grill.  It's a neat device, but at the end of the day, I feel the need to cut open the steak or chicken and look inside to decide if it's ready.

One of the great things about agile development is that you usually know the software is done because you get to see it working.  But while the work is going on, it's nice to have publicly visual indicators that tell me at a glance how things are coming.

In my last post on priorities, I mentioned the "Happy Brian List".  Below is a current example.  I had to smudge out a couple of areas, but hopefully the idea is clear.

Every day when we have our short status meeting (a "scrum"), it's easy to look at this board and see where we are.

Toward the end of a release, attention turns to the other end of the room where the QA team lists any key defects that need to be closed.  And as we get closer to releasing, we use the very high-tech release status indicator shown below.

Originally, I only drew the happy, neutral, and unhappy faces.  But someone on the team added the "arrow through head" status and taped next to it is this picture.

We've never been at "arrow through head" or "scream" status, but it probably helps to have them there to put things in perspective.  The point of having this is that the qualititative assessment of the team is actually a pretty good indicator of release readiness.  And I think it's fairly motivating not to have an unhappy face circled on the board that everyone can see.

So back in my very first post, I mentioned that we use Rally to manage our development.  And underneath the fun of the whiteboard, we are tracking storycards and tasks in Rally.

The online team here at NewsGator has chosen to make their whiteboard actually directly reflect Rally by putting their stories on sticky notes and moving them from column to column as the work progresses.

This is a more traditional scrum approach, and it has great value from a visual point of view as well.  If the cards are moving along smoothly throughout the iteration (the two-week development and test cycle), it is clear on the board.

So what kinds of systems do the rest of you use to visualize the product development process?