Team members update the task board continuously each sprint; if someone thinks of a new task (“test a new machine learning algorithm”), she writes a new card and puts it on the wall. Either during or before the daily scrum, estimates are changed (up or down), and cards are moved around the board.
Each row on the Scrum board is a user story, which is the unit of work we encourage teams to use for their product backlog.
During the sprint planning meeting, the team selects the product backlog items they can complete during the next Spring. Each product backlog item is turned into multiple sprint backlog items. Each of these is represented by one task card that is placed on the Scrumboard.
- Story (User Story): The story description (“As a user we want to…”) shown on that row.
- Ongoing: Any card being worked on goes here. The programmer who chooses to work on it moves it over when she's ready to start the task. Often, this happens during the daily scrum when someone says, “I'm going to work on the boojum today.”
- Testing: A lot of tasks have corresponding test task cards. So, if there's a “Code the boojum class” card, there is likely one or more task cards related to testing: “Test the boojum”, “Write FitNesse tests for the boojum,” “Write FitNesse fixture for the boojum,”
- Done: Cards pile up over here when they're done. They're removed at the end of the sprint. Sometimes we remove some or all during a sprint if there are a lot of cards.
Optionally, depending on the team, the culture, the project and other considerations:
- Notes: Just a place to jot a note or two.
- Tests Specified: We like to do “Story Test-Driven Development,” or “Acceptance Test-Driven Development,” which means the tests are written before the story is coded. Many teams find that it helps to have acceptance tests identified before coding begins on a particular story. This column just contains a checkmark to indicate the tests are specified.
