

StoryWall - cards on a wall. But, like, totally digital. - tobyhede
http://storywallapp.com/

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tobyhede
Despite an abundance of excellent management tools for project tracking in
lean and agile environments, nothing has ever quite matched for me the
flexibility and effectiveness of good , old-fashioned cards and post-its on a
wall.

With StoryWall I've tried to craft something that replicates an analogue story
wall as much as possible. Essentially no business rules at all, cards and
tokens (think post-its) with colour to create meaning. StoryWall: now with
even fewer features!

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evlpuppetmaster
My #1 feature request would be to make it touch-screen enabled. Along with
flexibility, the other major benefit of a physical storyboard is that it
fosters communication and collaboration by forcing people to get up from their
desks and talk face to face. Also in standup meetings it is invaluable to be
able to stand around the board and talk about what it is showing you regarding
blockages and flow, and immediately do something about it. So ideally you'd
project the board up on a big screen or a big TV or something. Then if anyone
has an ipad or iphone handy, you can update the board on the fly.

~~~
tobyhede
Yeah, there seems to be some consensus on the touch-enabled version.
Definitely something I want to solve (hopefully just a matter of hooking the
drag drop into touch events)

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ollysb
Looks very slick. Took a little while to understand that the buttons at the
top all work via drag/drop. It looks like you can only add information in a
single text box. I can see the appeal if you're just organising a single
iteration but a title and tags are probably going to be required to organise a
backlog.

~~~
tobyhede
I've been thinking about the BackLog problem a lot ... the problem I've always
had is the backlog tends to massivity (that's a word, right?) really quickly.
A profusion of ideas and notes and bugs that end up as a special type of
project debt and dragging the tool and team down with it. My current thought
is that beyond the immediate future, the backlog doesn't belong on your wall
at all ... use a wiki, or a bug tracker, or something designed to capture that
sort of information more completely than a planning tool. Stories get promoted
to the wall during planning and they are acted on immediately.

~~~
evlpuppetmaster
Yeah I agree. Part of the point of lean is not specifying too much too early.
Inevitably new ideas, problems, priorities will crop up and if you've specced
out too much too soon, some of it will go to waste.

Perhaps the ability to hook up with APIs would be useful though, so you can
manage features and bugs in other tools (GetSatisfaction eg).

~~~
tobyhede
One of the ideas I have been toying with is using StoryWall as the
visualisation tool that plugs into your other apps ... so purely for
communicating and visualising workflow, and the details of your system are in
tool of your choice.

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ljf
Looks great - seems a be a wave on Kanban and Scrum tools launching at the
moment. I wish there had been 2 years ago when I started using Agile/Scrum.

Currently using the beta version of scrumwise.com and am loving it. Working
great for us, but will check this (and Trello) out.

~~~
tobyhede
I haven't seen scrumwise before, will have a look.

As I mentioned elsewhere, StoryWall is clearly a very light-weight take on the
problem.

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manuscreationis
It feels like a less-complete version of Pivotal.

Which is good in a sense, because Pivotal is an awesome product.

Can you explain why someone would choose StoryWall over a service like
Pivotal?

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tobyhede
I have used Pivotal Tracker for years (including a current freelance project),
and it is pretty awesome. It does however have a pretty specific view of how
process should be visualised (current. backlog, icebox) and has a foot pretty
firmly in the Scrum school of thought. In a more kanban-flavoured process you
visualise your workflow as cards that move through different states (from
simple flows like todo, wip, done to more complex ones like plan, analysis,
develop, qa, release) at any point in time you can visualise exactly what the
state of your work is.

So ... to eventually get to the point, StoryWall is much lighter weight and
not really designed to complete with a fully-fledged agile project management
tool. But in that light weight comes great flexibility for visualising
workflow. Individuals, small/micro teams, lean environments, where just enough
process is enough ...

~~~
manuscreationis
Well said, thanks!

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0x12
Slight problem, on exiting the page and reloading the changes are all gone
(firefox)

No login is great for single users but I think you should persist changes
across reloads.

~~~
tobyhede
Should be using LocalStorage ... what version of FF, OS you on? Possibly a bug
and I will have a look.

~~~
0x12
4.0, ubuntu, cool idea btw, I hope you fly with it.

~~~
tobyhede
Thanks, I really appreciate it. Will post back here when I track down the
storage issue.

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wietsehage
We are currently using Joel Spolsky’s Trello (<http://trello.com>).

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tobyhede
I've definitely timed my run pretty well :P

I've had a look at the site, but not signed up as I have had a pretty clear
vision for storywall that I wanted to get out in the last couple of weeks.

What do you think of trello?

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wietsehage
We've been using Trello for a week now (coming from Basecamp) and it's pretty
great.

We really like the following features:

\- It's free

\- It's Realtime, every action (drag-drop edit etc) get's pushed to the other
users.

\- Great UX because it's made by the guys (or some of them) that did Stack
overflow.

\- Responsive design so we can use it on our webkit enabled phones.

~~~
tobyhede
Trello looks pretty good, will have to have a deeper look.

Realtime updates are deceptively complicated to get right. I bumped that whole
branch of development so I could get something out (really try to work some of
the ideas of Lean and the Minimal Viable Product).

