Over the lifetime of a project, there will be dozens or even hundreds of tasks that are created to describe the functionality and features that are to be developed. The organizational structure of these tasks has a significant impact on the efficiency and productivity of the development team and good organization can greatly assist in both the clarity of a task and the status of the project as a whole. Until recently, we have employed a list view for current tasks which essentially creates a single list of all active tasks. These tasks are assigned to a developer at the time that they are to be completed and are checked off when finished. This organizational structure is not ideal in terms of visual clarity, but requires little maintenance or upkeep. When a task is completed, it is simply marked as such, and after a review, is removed from the list.
Teamwork.com, which is the primary organizational software we use for Agile development has launched with a new feature. We are switching to a much more visual presentation of our current tasks which involves a ‘task board.’ Rather than a single list containing all active tasks, the new method will organize active tasks into distinct stages of completion. From Backlog -> In Progress -> In Review -> Staging -> Deployed. This method of organization provides much more information at a glance and will be much easier to not only find information relevant to a specific task/developer, but also the status of the project as a whole.
The board view requires more maintenance than the list view, but the tradeoff in efficiency and readability will help out a great deal moving forward. If you would like to learn more about using the task board view for software development in Teamwork give us a call.