Scrum Board

A Scrum Board is a tool that helps Teams make Sprint Backlog items visible. The board can take many physical and virtual forms but it performs the same function regardless of how it looks. The board is updated by the Team and shows all items that need to be completed for the current Sprint.

The board is traditionally divided up into three categories: To Do (Backlog), Work in Progress and Done.

Primary items on the scrum board are cards. Team members update the task board continuously throughout the sprint; if someone thinks of a new task, he/she writes a new card and puts it on the wall (if it is physical board) or create a new card in that "To Do" swim lane.

Cards can be represented with different color schemes and avatars. Basic idea is to as soon as some one glances at scrum board then he/she should get high level idea of progress as quickly as possible.

Scrum boards have vertical lines drawn on them to demarcate the swim lanes. Each swim lane can contain multiple user story cards. 3 Categories mentioned above To Do (Backlog), Work in Progress and Done are demarcated with swim lanes.

As the sprint progress, each story starts moving from left to right gradually. It is team member who is responsible for moving their items.

For better tracking, we can have "to do", "in progress" and "done" swim lanes for development phase, testing phase and acceptance testing phase.

For example: Developer picks up a story from sprint backlog and puts it Development In progress" swim lane. After completion she moves it to Development "Done".

From their, QA team member picks the development done story and puts that card in Testing "In Progress" swim lane. Once testing done then she can move it Testing Done swim lane and clearing path for acceptance testing and that will follow similar path from in progress to done.