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blog/_posts/2021-09-07-whiteboards.md

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+---
+title: Lots of whiteboards
+description: Classic product development hardware
+layout: hh
+tags: agile
+image: white-desk.jpg
+---
+
+![A white-desk](white-desk.jpg)
+
+<a class="unsplash" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/nvzvOPQW0gc" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span><svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 32 32"><title>unsplash-logo</title><path d="M20.8 18.1c0 2.7-2.2 4.8-4.8 4.8s-4.8-2.1-4.8-4.8c0-2.7 2.2-4.8 4.8-4.8 2.7.1 4.8 2.2 4.8 4.8zm11.2-7.4v14.9c0 2.3-1.9 4.3-4.3 4.3h-23.4c-2.4 0-4.3-1.9-4.3-4.3v-15c0-2.3 1.9-4.3 4.3-4.3h3.7l.8-2.3c.4-1.1 1.7-2 2.9-2h8.6c1.2 0 2.5.9 2.9 2l.8 2.4h3.7c2.4 0 4.3 1.9 4.3 4.3zm-8.6 7.5c0-4.1-3.3-7.5-7.5-7.5-4.1 0-7.5 3.4-7.5 7.5s3.3 7.5 7.5 7.5c4.2-.1 7.5-3.4 7.5-7.5z"></path></svg></span><span>Bench Accounting</span></a>
+
+If you ever wanted to know how many whiteboards your software development team members need, you just found the correct answer: _one each_.
+
+## The Scrum board does not replace a whiteboard 
+
+Most of the development teams I ever worked on had one whiteboard, which we used for the Scrum or Kanban board, because it gave us a convenient way to draw the board.
+It turns out that we shouldn’t have only used our whiteboard for the Scrum board.
+You need a whiteboard for day-to-day discussions, so you can use it as a rapid-prototyping tools for text and diagrams. 
+
+Writing on paper stickies with a whiteboard marker and then sticking them to a whiteboard wastes wastes the whiteboard’s one job: providing a convenient surface to write on.
+Any flat surface would do for a tasks board, although you may get in trouble if you draw columns on the wall with a marker.
+Instead, you can just tape paper signs to the wall to indicate the Scrum board columns, such as _To do_ and _Done_.
+
+## High-bandwidth communication 
+
+Software developers spend a lot of their time _talking_ to each other, either face-to-face, via video chat, or asynchronously via text chat.
+Software development requires a lot of this ad hoc communication, which it emphasises over written documentation.
+Agile methods do this for three reasons:
+
+1. to avoid fixing information such as software requirements until as late as possible
+2. because it doesn’t take as long
+3. because a conversation between two people has higher bandwidth than writing a specification. 
+
+The highest bandwidth communication between two people combines face-to-face verbal communication… plus a whiteboard.
+This combination gives you a conversation with quick diagrams. 
+
+It matters that you use low-fidelity [back-of-the-napkin|http://www.danroam.com/the-back-of-the-napkin/]-style diagrams that you can draw quickly.
+This part doesn’t work as well on a computer, where diagramming software invokes a time warp.
+Time slows down while you endlessly fiddle with box alignment and arrow placement.
+A picture sometimes takes as long to produce as a thousand words.
+
+## Team whiteboards 
+
+Despite whiteboards’ usefulness, many teams have a single shared whiteboard.
+Just one.
+If your team only has one whiteboard then they can only have one high-bandwidth conversation at a time.
+Unless you exclusive use team programming, this unnecessarily constrains communication.
+
+Centralised discussion belongs old-fashioned school classrooms and meetings, not for software development teams.
+Treating a whiteboard marker like a software development team’s talking stick annoys programmers as much a version control system that locks files on check-out.
+(Yes, that used to happen, and 
+[frequently ended badly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_SourceSafe#Criticism).)
+
+Sometimes you can tell that you don’t have enough whiteboards: 
+they run out of space, and team members have to write ‘DNE’ (do not erase) on whiteboards that other people use.
+Heuristic: you don’t have enough whiteboards when you have fewer whiteboards than people.
+
+## Remote ‘whiteboards’
+
+Working remotely changes your relationship with whiteboards.
+Although you might have one where you work, it no longer provides a shared space, and unless you have a second high-quality camera for it, no-one else can see it properly.
+Distributed teams need effective electronic solutions instead.