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Some time ago when Mike was in London we had a bit of a hat about using JIRA as a tool to manage agile projects. We could enter the cards as issues and then you would have happy management. Develpers would then pick up the cards from JIRA instead, and work on them.

But of course we don’t work that way. Its ironic that we are developing sophisticated software systems using index cards, but they have some very important advantages over issue tracking systems and other electronc management tools.

• Cards are concrete — well paper actually, but what I mean is they can be shuffled, passed from hand to hand, shoved around the table, placed in piles, crossed off or even torn up.

• Stuck on the wall they are visible — and when you place a big bold cross on them you can easily see how many you have done.

• A pile of cards on the todo pile gives visual cues of the amount of work left — big pile or small pile.

• You can stick task cards under the story cards to which they relate.

• You can staple related cards together

• you can move cards into different areas to indicate different priorities — in our project higher up the board means higher priority

• different areas of the board have meaning — ‘ongoing’ cards and ‘targets of opportunity’ each have their own area on our board

All good reasons to use cards. But I got to thinking about it, and there’s nothing there that you couldn’t actually do in code. And if the paradigm (ugh) works well for cards, why not for other things?

Imagine a “surface” with a set of “things” — little boxes with text in them or whatever. You could associate an axis on the screen (say the y axis) with an attribute of the “thing” (say priority). Then dragging the “thing” up or down the screen would change the priority of the thing itself.

Or define a “region” of the screen to be associated with a particular value of an attribute — following the story cards idea lets say that you have a region for each iteration. Then dragging a card into that region would set the iteration on it.

But of course the “things” don’t have to be cards. Say you are managing a unix system with many processes. Dragging a process up or down might change its priority.

And such a system could layout the things for you — so if you went into some other system and changed the card’s priority and came back to the visualisation, then the card should have moved.

So I guess what I want is a generic visual layout engine that lets me do this sort of thing — almost a two-way dot

Does anything like this exist or am I going to have to write it? :-)

This entry was posted on Friday, December 5th, 2003 at 11:24 pm and is filed under life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.