Most of the Scrum teams use a task board to visualize their activity and progress with task cards. In these two blog posts, Keith Clinton, the author of Agile Game Development with Scrum, discusses the concept of feature boards and feature cards.
Task cards contain information about individual tasks that will be needed to complete a set of features. Keith Clinton says that the problem of task boards is the lack of visibility of cross-discipline dependencies. In a feature board, cards move around the board depending on the work that is being done.
The feature card contains the following elements : title, description, acceptance criteria, estimates and tasks.
There are three benefits of feature boards over traditional Scrum task board:
* feature boards focus the team on completing prioritized features over merely completing tasks in any particular order.
* feature boards help balance cross-discipline teams.
* feature boards help limit Work-in-Progress (WiP).
The conclusion is that “Feature Boards fit best within a time-boxed iteration which has a lot of “swarming”. “Swarming” means that there is an unpredictable flow of work between disciplines to create a feature and the feature will bounce around or iterate unpredictably before the fun is discovered.”
Read these two complete blog posts about feature board and feature rards on http://blog.agilegamedevelopment.com/2014/04/feature-boards.html and http://blog.agilegamedevelopment.com/2014/04/feature-cards.html.
There’s an additional benefit to tracking features vs. tasks — From a product owner perspective, reporting on features to the executive team provides actionable intelligence for the business. Knowing when a feature will be complete means that the business can plan.