From e3116f45c8c4cbb760a209de2cc402e2ed07ba52 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Peter Hilton Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2021 07:03:15 +0200 Subject: [PATCH] Add blog post --- blog/_posts/2021-09-07-whiteboards.md | 63 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 63 insertions(+) create mode 100644 blog/_posts/2021-09-07-whiteboards.md diff --git a/blog/_posts/2021-09-07-whiteboards.md b/blog/_posts/2021-09-07-whiteboards.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..857ad40e --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/_posts/2021-09-07-whiteboards.md @@ -0,0 +1,63 @@ +--- +title: Lots of whiteboards +description: Classic product development hardware +layout: hh +tags: agile +image: white-desk.jpg +--- + +![A white-desk](white-desk.jpg) + +unsplash-logoBench Accounting + +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.