The Scrum Board: Visualizing the Sprint's Workflow
A Scrum board is a visual snapshot of a team's work in a sprint, making progress and bottlenecks obvious. Teams use it to track tasks from "To Do" to "Done," ensuring alignment. The footgun: mistaking the board for Scrum itself; it's a helpful tool, not.
THE MENTAL MODEL: A Scrum board is a physical or digital visualization of the Sprint Backlog. It's a tool for making work and its flow visible to the entire team and its stakeholders. Its primary purpose is to increase transparency and facilitate communication during a sprint. It answers the question "What are we working on, and where is it in our process?" for everyone at a glance.
HOW IT WORKS: The board is divided into vertical columns representing the stages of a team's workflow. A simple version has three columns: "To Do," "In Progress," and "Done." Each work item from the Sprint Backlog is a card. As a team member starts an item, they move its card from "To Do" to "In Progress." When the work is completed according to the Definition of Done, the card moves to "Done." Teams often customize columns to match their process, adding stages like "Code Review," "Testing," or "Ready for Deployment."
WHEN TO USE IT: Use a Scrum board to manage the flow of work within a single sprint. It's the focal point for the Daily Scrum, helping the team coordinate its activities and identify impediments. It's also a powerful information radiator, providing a constant, real-time status update that reduces the need for separate status meetings.
WHEN NOT TO USE IT: A Scrum board is not a long-term project plan or a product roadmap; those are managed with the Product Backlog. It is also not a tool for a manager to assign tasks. The Development Team pulls work from the "To Do" column as they have capacity, which promotes self-organization. The board reflects the team's plan, it doesn't dictate it.
ONE CANONICAL EXAMPLE: A team's board has four columns: "Sprint Backlog," "In Progress," "In Review," and "Done." During the Daily Scrum, a developer moves a user story card from "In Progress" to "In Review." Another developer sees this and knows it's ready for a peer code review. This visual flow prevents work from piling up. A key insight from the Scrum framework is that while this board is immensely useful, it is not a formal artifact like the Product Backlog or Sprint Backlog. It is simply a common practice.
Read the original → resources.scrumalliance.org
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