Building a Scrum Board

I just returned from my ScrumMaster certification training in Kansas City and have been refining our work process accordingly. We decided to build a physical, index card based scrum board in the office.

More information on how it's organized and built after the jump.

The board we built is temporary because we may be moving offices soon. We built it straight on the wall with blue masking tape and index cards. It's organized in a bit more of a kanban style than the traditional scrum board (which is really just another type of kanban board).

Backlog Columns

Backlog - This space is for the top, approved items in the product backlog. Our product owner uses this space so he can see the top items in case the team decides we can add more items to the current sprint and when planning for the next sprint.

To Do - This column is for the current sprint's backlog.

In Progress Columns

User Interface, Database, Middle Tier, QA - These columns represent specific portions of development for a particular feature. We are testing out these divisions and if they don't help us (we suspect the database column won't get much use) we'll change or remove them.

Done Column

This is where we move features when the team has completed the definition of done for the item. Our product owner can then verify that the feature meets his standards of done and it is then added to our next Sprint Review.

Adding a percentage bar to the console

public static void OverwriteConsoleMessage(string message)
{
Console.CursorLeft = 0;
int maxCharacterWidth = Console.WindowWidth - 1;
if (message.Length > maxCharacterWidth)
{
message = message.Substring(0, maxCharacterWidth - 3) + "...";
}
message = message + new string(' ', maxCharacterWidth - message.Length);
Console.Write(message);
}
public static void RenderConsoleProgress(int percentage)
{
RenderConsoleProgress(percentage, '\u2590', Console.ForegroundColor, "");
}
public static void RenderConsoleProgress(int percentage, 
char progressBarCharacter, 
ConsoleColor color, string message)
{
Console.CursorVisible=false;
ConsoleColor originalColor = Console.ForegroundColor;
Console.ForegroundColor = color;
Console.CursorLeft = 0;
int width = Console.WindowWidth - 1;
int newWidth = (int)((width * percentage) / 100d);
string progBar = new string(progressBarCharacter, newWidth) + 
new string(' ', width - newWidth);
Console.Write(progBar);
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(message)) message = "";
Console.CursorTop++;
OverwriteConsoleMessage(message);
Console.CursorTop--;
Console.ForegroundColor = originalColor;
Console.CursorVisible = true;
}