A few years ago, I worked in a large software team where all of the tie-wearing developers were in the office for 9am. We had bags of office space and whiteboards EVERYWHERE. One of the things I saw done particularly well in that company was the way in which they used whiteboards to track the progress of the sprint against the sprint tasks (sprint backlog) and draw up the burn-down.

At a glance, these “information radiators” as the Head of Web used to call them, anyone in the office could see how each sprint was going and, scratching the surface a little, they could see which tasks were proving problematic.

This works beautifully in an office based team where everyone could attend scrum on a daily basis and update their hours against each task on the sprint backlog. Where it doesn’t work quite so well is in a distributed team where the team members may be in different offices, homes or even countries. In my current company we’re putting together just such a distributed team and I want to try and make sure we don’t lose the effect that these whiteboards have on the visibility of the progress of the team.

TFS offers a solution and allows developers to update their hours spent/hours remaining against sprint backlog tasks, but it’s all a bit “hidden” for my liking and in order to keep scrum quick, the team need to be able to see the state of the sprint at the end of each scrum without running reports.

When I first saw Google Wave I thought it might offer a solution. Real time application collaboration with data stored in and retrieved from the cloud asynchronously – fantastic. What’s more, Torben Weis had already written Plany, a neat little project management gadget that provided a good framework to get going with.

After a fair bit of tinkering and a lot of learning, out popped Sprintboard, which emulates almost everything that we used to do with whiteboards in my former role. There’s plenty I want to do with it (Product Backlog tba) and I wasn’t going to put it public until it was much further down the line than it is, but that wouldn’t have been very agile of me now, would it.

Take a look, leave your feedback in comments and I’ll get requests put on the backlog. I’m also going to put this in some kind of shared source control (possibly google project hosting) which should help things no end.

You can add the gadget, for the moment, from http://www.devballs.com/wave/table.xml