Best practices

Agile dashboards

You can easily build an Agile Dashboard by combining the agile wiki plugins with the Table plugin. In fact, for each newly created CodeBeamer project there will be a default wiki page created with the name "Agile Dashboard". This clearly illustrates the idea, and can be edited or copied for further customization.

Information radiators

Simply speaking, information radiators are publicly visible displays that shows people what's going on with the current iteration or with the project overall.

They can be as simple, as a large LCD TV with a periodically refreshing dashboard on it. The dashboard should display statistics about the currently running sprints, a Burn Down Chart per team, the status of the last CI build, number of the recently created and solved work items and so on and so on. How you compose its content should rely on the key performance metrics of your company.

To implement this with CodeBeamer, you should consider:

• creating a wiki page with wiki plugins laid out in a grid
• use a tiny javascript to remove the header, footer, menu bar and other decoration (hint: use jQuery)
• use another javascript to reload it in every 5 minutes

Learn more about the concept of information radiators by Alistair Cockburn.

WiP limits

WiP limits (Word in Progress limits) mean a simple, but efficient way of preventing bottlenecks in the software development "pipeline".

In nutshell, limiting WiP means setting up minimum and maximum values for each column in your cardboard. For example, having less than 2 cards in the "ToDo" column means that you will soon run out of work to do, thus should be flagged. In the other end, having more than 5 cards in the "To Verify" column means that the QA team is overloaded, and suggests that your team should re-allocate resources to testing to remove the bottleneck.

WiP limits can vary between columns, and should match your team’s capacity. The cardboard will help you get to the right WiP limit as you become better at it.

Can you actually afford not having WiP limits?

• Without WiP limits you will continue to pile up partially completed work.
• Adding to your WiP without completing anything increases the duration of all tasks in the queue. Having a large duration (lead time) can significantly effect your team's profitability.