In previous articles I have discussed the theory and the practice of choosing vertical columns for an Agile Board to represent the workflow steps that tickets pass through as they move across the board from left-to-right. But a board is a two-dimensional grid, and we now turn to the other, vertical plane. For some reason, rather than the conventional terminology of columns and rows, the jargon in Agile Board World is to talk of columns and swimlanes, so that is our topic here.

Previous articles have argued that using the vertical plane to show priority is a better method than using priority flags, and that one-ticket-wide columns on an Agile Board implement this beneficial principle. You can move a ticket up to show an increase in priority, but other other tickets have to move down to make room – your board is both showing and enforcing a trade-off decision:

This example shows tickets moving within a single swimlane. But what if you have multiple swimlanes, stacked vertically one on top of the other? In this case you must stick by the rule that vertical position is always and only used to show priority, and that means we must set up our boards such that higher swimlanes have a greater priority than lower ones. This restricts the meaning we can give to swimlanes on a board.

Let’s consider the hypothetical board below, which has 14 tickets on it, distributed across three swimlanes. I have used the triangulation method to show the order of tickets. Whatever meanings we give to the red, yellow and green swimlanes, it must be the case that ticket 4 is more important than ticket 5, and ticket 11 is more important than 12.

Very often you will find Agile Boards are set up with swimlanes corresponding to functional areas, and this may conflict with the principle that vertical position shows priority. If it does conflict, you should not use your swimlanes to show functional areas (there are other means of filtering down to the functional level, which I will cover in a future article).

I recently spent some time in a team building an enterprise level identity system, and three of our functional areas were 1) registration, 2) sign-out and 3) user uplift. As it turns out, there was not a clean and strict mapping of priorities onto these functional areas; some registration work was relatively important, and some was not, and the same applied to the other two functional areas. We therefore did not set up a swimlane for each functional area, as the board would have been falsely indicating the priority of some tickets.

So what should you map your swimlanes to, so that you don’t break the vertical position shows priority principle? There are no doubt many possible answers, but I will consider two swimlane patterns below that between them cover a large percentage of cases.

First let’s consider a team that is in control of its own delivery cadence, and either is already doing, or aspires to move in the direction of, Continuous Delivery; in other words, they release work to Live in frequent small batches. What swimlanes might be chosen by such a team?

This team’s board needs to cope with both normal, planned work, and the all-too-common situation that something super-urgent crops up, requiring normal planned work be dropped immediately until the crisis is over. Such emergency situations are typically due to the discovery of a nasty bug in Production.

Since Emergencies are the highest of all possible priorities, they go in the highest lane up the board, with ‘normal work’ sitting below it, as here:

How do these swimlanes get used in practice? We of course want visual representation of work and preferred team behaviour to dovetail neatly and reinforce each other, and this swimlane layout can certainly do so.

Team rules around emergencies are usually something like: 1) verify any claim that new work really deserves ‘emergency’ status, 2) if it does, everybody who can help with the emergency does so immediately and only returns to other tasks when they can do no more on the emergency work.

A top-of-the-board Emergency Lane is admirably suited to this. Any ticket in that lane is above the fold on a computer screen, and is the very first thing any user’s eyes fall on. A new ticket arriving in this lane cannot be missed, and is a clear signal for the appropriate group of people to verify if the ticket is a genuine emergency or not, in which case they move the ticket out of the top lane. For tickets that stay in the Emergency Lane, that is again a strong visual signal that work exists that needs full and immediate attention, with team members resuming other work lower down the board only when the emergency allows.

The disruption caused by emergency tickets is considerable, even worse than normal context switching, since a) there is usually no option to get the prior work to a nice, neat point before dropping it, and b) working on an emergency often leaves you in a frazzled mental and emotional state, not easy to switch back out of. This makes it critically important to ensure the Emergency Lane is treated with proper respect, ie for genuine emergencies only. Such disruption is only merited in extreme cases.

There can be a temptation for people to try to slip tickets into the Emergency Lane just to get stuff done faster, and the team need to be on their guard against any freeloading on this crisis-management process. The very term “Emergency Lane” is helpful; less impactful alternative names such as “Expedite” don’t provoke such an emotional response. Saying you want to “expedite” a ticket is really quite different from looking a colleague in the eye and declaring that your work is a genuine emergency!

This two lane pattern of Emergency Lane and Normal Prio Lane works, without much modification, for the majority of modern software development teams. It also applies to most teams outside the world of software – I have successfully run a marketing and a finance team using this pattern of Agile Board, for example.

However I use a different board pattern in situations where releasing continually is impossible, meaning you cannot avoid having less frequent, big-batch releases, which can be seen queueing one after the other a considerable time in advance. A canonical example would be an iOS team, where the release process has a major bottleneck that cannot be overcome; namely, the submission and approval process of the App Store, which takes around a week, during which time you can make no further changes to the submitted binary without the clock starting again.

Typically iOS teams respond to this constraint by aiming for one or two releases to the App Store a month, and it would be quite normal to have company personnel actively working across perhaps the next three iOS releases. This would be reflected in the structure of swimlanes on the iOS team Agile Board:

This hypothetical team has version 1.2.1 already out in the App Store, and the main focus of team is currently on the next release, v1.3. As the end of this release approaches, team members who are freed up will gradually shift on to the following release, v1.4. Naturally this is of lower priority (as reflected by the lower position of its swimlane), and if anything comes up in v1.3 people will switch back to that. The position of the swimlanes helps team members make the right decisions – it’s more important to get the v1.3 binary completely finished and into the App Store queue this week than to work on some functionality in v1.4 that isn’t shipping till next month.

And this pattern repeats. Perhaps the planned release after v1.4 is a major new version, v2.0. Some people (perhaps Product, Architects, Designers…) are already starting to put some preliminary work into that one, and that can be neatly shown on the board. But if they were needed to work on v1.3 or v1.4, you would generally expect them to interrupt work on v2.0 to do so, and the board shows that visually – those lanes are higher up, so that work is higher priority. You can use the triangulation method and trust what it tells you.

In summary, these are two practical swimlane patterns that together cover the needs of many teams;  one for small-batch release setups where the version number of your tech product changes frequently, and it is hard to predict ahead of time exactly which version a given piece of work will end up in. The other is for large-batch release setups, where these things are much more likely to be known up front. In both cases the swimlanes respect the rule of using vertical position to show priority, and all the advantages of being able to easily read the board by triangulation are retained.

It is of course always possible that any given team may empirically discover alternative swimlane arrangements that work for them, but to abandon the use of the the vertical plane to show priority is usually a retrograde step, and should be avoided, as with the examples given here.

In previous articles we have discussed what an Agile Board might look like for a typical software development team, but this will bring no rewards unless we know how to use it properly, for example in a properly conducted stand-up meeting.

A major function – arguably, the prime function – of an Agile Board is to make team priorities absolutely clear, so that all team members can be sure that they are working on What The Team Needs Most. For this to happen, everybody needs to be reading the board in the same consistent way, and that way must be simple, or people will get it wrong.

This article will explain what that simple method is.

Let’s start with some examples. Below is a simplified cut of an Agile Board, with just two tickets showing. Let’s say you are a team member reading this board, and as it happens your skill set and the state of those tickets means you are able to assist on either one of them. Question: which one should you pick to work on first, X or Y?

The correct answer is pick X before Y, because in a properly functioning Agile Board, the vertical plane is reserved to show priority. Higher up means higher priority, and X is higher up, so you work on X first, as below:

There is little controversy here; I have asked this question to real people hundreds of times, and everyone basically gets this right first time.

Now let’s try the same exercise for a different cut of the board. Again, you are a team member reading this board, and you are able to assist on both the tickets that are showing. Which one should you pick first, X or Z?

There is an equally clear answer here, which the great majority of people also get right first time. The answer is to pick Z before X, because Z is further to the right, ie it is closer to being Done, and ‘Done’ is what counts, the thing that delivers value to the organisation. Sadly in life it usually is very easy to start things, but it can be hard to finish them off, so an effective team concentrates on getting stuff finished before new stuff is started, and this desirable behaviour is promoted by reading the board in this way.

The third and final quiz question is a combination of the two above. Again, other things being equal, in which order should someone pick up the following three tickets?

The answer is pick Z before X, and X before Y. This is a simple combination of the two rules above, which leads to reading the board in a kind of triangulation method, from top-right (where you’ll find the most important tickets on a board) to bottom left (where you find the least important):

Now let’s apply this triangulation method to a more realistic board setup. This is exactly what a team is trying to do in every Stand-up meeting, so that it can discuss the tickets in priority order. Applying the triangulation method to this board we can easily label the tickets on it from 1 (the most important) down to the 17, the very least. The ‘Done’ tickets are ignored in this exercise – by definition, if they are Done, there is no work left to do on them.

And how do you apply this rule to a board which has Swimlanes? Since the correct use of Swimlanes (discussed in detail here) maintains the principle of using the vertical plane for priority (i.e. higher up Swimlanes are higher priority than lower swimlanes), it is still easy to apply the triangulation rule and again number every ticket on the board from most important (1) to least (17):

Sometimes, when applying the triangulation method, a team member will voice an objection: what the board is saying is not correct! And indeed in a well-functioning team there is a bi-directional effort going on at all times:

1. work in the order the board tells you to work
2. make sure the board is always telling the truth about the order to work on

Any team member must be empowered to challenge the signals the board gives out if there is any doubt. Far better to do so than to slavishly follow what the board says even if it is potentially wrong, or to do what you believe is correct without reflecting that choice on the board, leaving your teammates in the dark as to what you’re doing and why.

So a comment such as the following is an entirely legitimate statement to hear in a good team: “the board is telling me to pick up ticket 512, but surely I should be doing ticket 197 instead, for reasons a,b,c,d… “. If, on examination, reasons a, b, c and d stand up, then as far as possible the board should be amended to reflect the Real Truth, and that team member has done everyone a service. It is everyone’s duty to Make The Board Tell The Truth!

With the whole team taking collective ownership of their Agile Board, ensuring that The Board Always Tells The Truth, that team can jointly and individually use the triangulation rule to work out what to do next, and everyone ends up working on What The Team Needs Most. And the end result of that is a team that is continually aligned and with every chance of delivering effectively, with all the increased motivation to individuals and value to the organisation that such a result entails.

The ability to show the priority of a given piece of work is pretty important, I think all would agree. But what is the best way of recording and showing this information? Unfortunately the most common method, using a priority flag, is far from the best.

Most users of work-managing software will encounter plenty of priority flags, usually set by some kind of dropdown control. There’s no consistency between systems in terms of the vocabulary or number of choices that are offered; sometimes the choices are mere numbers, sometimes words, sometimes a mix. And even within a specific set of users of a single system it is rare to have universal agreement on what a ‘2’ or a ‘Minor’ actually means, or when each should be applied. One man’s Blocker is another man’s P4, it often turns out.

And this vagueness often (always?) leads to a dangerous phenomenon – ‘priority inflation’, analogous to grade inflation, where far too many tickets end up in the the very top priority buckets, rendering your prioritisation system useless.

This phenomenon is easily explained by simple psychology. When you are entering work into a system, it’s usually because you want it to be done. Let’s say you have 5 different priority levels to choose from; you know that a prio 5 ain’t gonna get done before the Heat Death of the Universe, and probably a prio 4 is in the same boat. So really you’re now choosing between prios 1, 2 and 3. But you know that everybody else thinks that way too, so it’s probably safest to make your task at least a 2 just to be safe. Or if there’s the slightest bit of genuine pressure for that piece of work, in which case the temptation to put a 1 is almost overwhelming.

After all, there’s rarely anything in a priority flag system that limits the number of allowed P1s, such as a “one in, one out” rule. So why not chuck it in the top buckets, as everyone else is doing?

And so priority flags lead to priority inflation. In the worst case virtually everything ends up as a P1 – or perhaps there are so many P1s that it’s utterly unclear what really needs to be done first. So the whole system has collapsed.

What is the alternative? It’s simple; instead of a priority flag, you maintain a priority-ordered list of work, with the most important thing at the top. When a new item comes in (or an existing item is reordered), other items have to move to make room for it. In other words, you have to make a trade-off decision – “sure, this thing can go up …but something else has to go down”.

Trade-off decisions are hard. But prioritisation in a world of limited resource is genuinely difficult, and it’s better to face up to reality than to hide from it. Any worthwhile system for representing priority should force decision-makers to confront trade-offs, rather than allowing a pseudo-decision. In priority-ordered lists, there is no such thing as ‘two items that have the same priority’, so the trade-off decision has to be made. In a priority flag system, by contrast, you can have half your total backlog categorised as a P1, and nothing tells you that you have a big problem – until the customer finds that their deadline has passed and their P1 work never got done.

In the world of software development teams, you do often find priority-ordered lists. They exist at the strategic level, ie the product backlog and/or strategic roadmap. They also exist at the tactical level, the Agile Board, as long as each column on the board is only one-ticket wide. In such a setup, a ticket’s increasing priority is shown by moving it up (the yellow ticket), but the board demands that the necessary trade-off decision is faced up to, and displayed for the world to see – the red and green tickets have to go down.

So one of the advantages of representing your work on an Agile Board with one-ticket-wide columns is that you can show priority the good way – every column is a priority-ordered list. This will turn out, as we will see in a future article, to be a key ingredient in reading the entire board correctly, when we don’t just have to worry about one column on its own, but need to be able to prioritise columns of tickets against each another.

In a previous article we outlined the steps for a hypothetical, generic software development team to get work from its starting state of ‘Idea’ to the key intermediate state, ‘Ready for Dev’ (R4D):

getting tickets ready					delivering
Idea	Triaging	Ticket Prep	Hand-shaking	R4D	bla…	Done

This article will examine what steps might follow, all the way to the nirvana that is ‘Done’, which means that code is tested and working in production, in use by real customers of the business, and hopefully generating some value for the organisation.

The next step after R4D is, uncontroversially, ‘In Dev’. Is this just ‘writing the code’? In fact it is that, and more. For this step, as for all steps in the workflow, the team needs to explicitly agree, and then adhere to, their own criteria for what it means to have successfully completed the step. Typically for ‘In Dev’ this includes meeting team rules around coding standards, writing appropriate unit and integration tests, version control usage and so on.

Whatever specifics the team decides on this, the point at which a ticket goes into the ‘In Dev’ state is a critical point in its lifecycle. As a general rule, much more work, and work that is much more difficult and costly to undo, happens during and after this stage than what went before. This matters greatly when, as is inevitable, the prospect arises that the specifications or the priority of a given piece of work should perhaps be amended.

These decisions should be made on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis, and it is precisely at ‘In Dev’ that the cost element rises considerably, raising the bar on giving the go-ahead to such changes. This means that putting a ticket into ‘In Dev’ should never be done frivolously, as it represents a step-change in the team’s commitment of effort. Promoting the right kind of discipline around this is one of the key functions of the pre-R4D states on the board.

getting ready		ready	delivering
Idea	bla…	R4D	In Dev	?	?	?	?	?	Done

What happens after ‘In Dev’? Coding is so important and difficult to get right that it is usually worth rigorously double-checking, and we call that out in our workflow under a separate step, here named ‘Code Review’. How that reviewing happens is again for the team to decide. Sometimes just a quick look from one other person is sufficient, but at other times you might need multiple people to check multiple times before work passes muster. Tools such as Github’s Pull Request review system are often used to make this intra-dev communication easier, and a single PR can end up with dozens of comments from multiple people. It’s usually best practice to summarise the results of that conversation in a more widely-available place, where those unable or unwilling to use Github can see the outcome; the obvious place is the tool used to generate the Agile Board, such as Jira.

Some teams consider that the practice of pair-programming – where two programmers collaborate closely at the same screen/keyboard to write code together – counts as ‘Code Reviewing As You Go’, and therefore any code that results from pairing needs no further checking stage. But it’s a rare team that applies this practice to absolutely every piece of work (I’ve only known one to do so in nearly 20 years in software development), and so it’s a rare team that cannot benefit from a separate ‘Code Review’ step on their Agile Board.

getting ready		ready	delivering
Idea	bla…	R4D	In Dev	Code Review	?	?	?	?	Done

When a ticket has passed Code Review, that means the Dev sub-team considers the ticket ‘code complete’; in other words, that their work is done. Sadly this is often ludicrously far from the truth, and people can be delusional about how much work still remains to be done, with multiple steps of getting code merged, tested, approved and deployed. This cartoon puts it well:

Credit

In our hypothetical team, after Code Review it is the turn of the QA (Quality Assurance) aka Testing sub-team to do their stuff. Given that the QA team is often overstretched, and is hardly ever able to pick up every ticket the very moment it passes Code Review, we need a buffer state next called ‘Ready for QA’, the inbox for the QA team.

getting ready		ready	delivering
Idea	bla…	R4D	In Dev	Code Review	Ready for QA	?	?	?	Done

The QA sub-team picks from this ‘Ready for QA’ column, in priority order of course. QA work is often a mix of coding high-level acceptance tests, and manual testing. How much of each depends on what is being tested (front-end and mobile apps need more manual testing than pure server-side code with no UI), the skills of the testing team, and the technical maturity of the team overall.

For this example workflow we will include all of this under a single step, ‘In QA’, though this step can be broken out into separate sub-steps for Automated and Manual QA if required. If a team aspires to a BDD model, some or even all of the Automated Tests might have been written in parallel with, or even before, production code was written at the ‘In Dev’ stage. In my experience few teams manage anything like this BDD ideal in practice, but if a team does this or is determined to try, they would amend their workflow model accordingly, perhaps by having a step for ‘Automated Tests’ after R4D, before ‘In Dev’. But I will stick with a simpler workflow for now in this example, this single step called ‘In QA’.

getting ready		ready	delivering
Idea	bla…	R4D	In Dev	Code Review	Ready for QA	In QA	?	?	Done

What does it mean to finish this step? As ever, each team must develop and follow its own rules, but a common approach is that finishing this step means: code has been validated against its specification by the QA sub-team, that relevant bugs have been raised (as separate-but-linked tickets and/or as part of the ticket being tested), that bugs above some agreed impact threshold have been recoded, retested and are now passing, and that the ticket as whole is therefore considered deployable to the Live environment by both of the technical sub-teams, QA and Dev.

At this point a quick discussion of environments is in order. In these articles I am keeping discussion of technical considerations to a minimum, as they are complex and polemical in their own right. Nevertheless it is pretty much universal that business value is only provided when code is accessible to real users in a Live (or ‘Production’) environment, and that all the pre-steps we have been discussing happen in various lower environments. Quite which environments and what names they go under varies widely, although it is (unsurprisingly) a common pattern that QA steps happen on an environment called ‘Test’, where code from multiple different developers has been merged. The very purpose of both the QA steps and the Test environment is to give us sufficient confidence to deploy the new code to Live without panicking that our users’ world will collapse as a consequence. The dire consequences of not having separate Test and Live environments is the subject of dark humour in the industry:

So, post-QA, are we ready to deploy to Live? In some teams, yes. In others, the Product function prefers a formal Sign-off stage. If everything prior to Sign-off has been performed correctly, this should be a formality, and (like any step) if it is found to generate little value then the team should consider a process simplification, removing that step both from what they do and how they model it on an Agile Board. But sometimes a Sign-off step is required, and it is not prima facie unreasonable for the person who requested the work (ideally that very individual, often a BA or Product Owner) to confirm whether they’ve got what they asked for, neatly completing a request-response loop and avoiding much potential embarrassment from the wrong thing going Live.

getting ready		ready	delivering
Idea	bla…	R4D	In Dev	Code Review	Ready for QA	In QA	Sign-off	?	Done

Note that calling out a formal Sign-off step does not have to mean a team is going down a stratified, siloed, somewhat Waterfall way of working. As we have stated in previous articles, a board is necessarily a simplified model of a workflow. One of the most obvious simplifications is that it represents steps in a single, linear flow, with a particular team sub-function usually having the major responsibility for each step. But in well-functioning, well-integrated teams, the reality may be far more fluid; pairs or small groups from different sub-functions can and often should work together at multiple stages of the flow. It is a sign of good teamwork when you hear comments such as “that ticket can go straight to Sign-off from Code Review – Dev X and QA Y have been pairing on it the whole time, so it has already been tested”, or a Product person says “that one can count as signed-off already; I went through it all at QA Z’s desk yesterday when she was testing the last part”. I will never complain when, without cheating, a ticket shoots through some stages of its life on its journey to Done.

Now, after Sign-off, the ticket is indeed Ready for Live. I have known server teams with completely automated continuous deployment pipelines where this step (and several others) are unnecessary; it is an automated script on a CI server that auto-deploys any code whose tests turn a dashboard green on a lower environment, so there’s no human intervention required, insufficient time for them to do so even if they wanted, and therefore no point representing such steps on an Agile Board. But equally there are many teams where the work and process required for a Live deployment is sufficient, and sufficiently separate, to justify a ‘Ready for Live’ column on the board. One we’ve added that, we have a complete workflow from ‘Idea’ to ‘Done’, and the resulting Agile Board looks like this:

Calling something ‘Done’ means there is nothing more for this team to do. Some teams (perhaps with a sub-optimal tech pipeline) in fact do need to do further explicit checks in the Live environment itself, and in this case they may need to add further columns to represent that work, but in this hypothetical team we will take ‘deploying to Live’ as the last thing that this team needs to do.

In fact from the organisational perspective it is rarely true that no more work at all applies to what you have just deployed. Someone should be checking on the take-up amongst real users of that lovely new feature you spent two months building – if it is widely used, perhaps it should be enhanced. If it’s not used at all, perhaps it should be redesigned or removed. This is the Lean Startup Build-Measure-Learn loop, where all of these workflow steps are just the ‘Build’ part.

But the timescales over which the Measure and Learn steps happen are often large, and usually involve relatively few people from the software development team itself, and so while that monitoring and thinking could (and probably should) be modelled on some Agile Board, it is usually not put onto the development team’s board – at least until the loop has completed and new work arrives in the guise of new tickets ideas all the way over on the left of the dev team’s board, and the cycle begins again:

So now our hypothetical dev team has a complete board, the next step is to make sure we use the board in the right way. And that means we need to know how to read it properly, which is the subject of the next article.