Task Board

An important tool in the Agile development toolkit is the Task (or Kanban) board. This board provides quick visual feedback on what tasks need to be done over the sprint and how they are progressing. Throughout the sprint, tasks are taken from the sprint backlog by a team member, the corresponding programming, testing, and documentation done, moving the task progressively across the board. Traditionally, these boards are bulletin boards and the tasks are represented by index cards pinned to them:

Task Boards for our Class

IN MS Teams, you can create a Planner tab that can be used in a similar fashion. These consists of tasks that are sorted into “buckets”. There are several strategies your team can adopt to make use of this.

One possibility is to create buckets to duplicate the traditional layout of a Kanban board, and create separate Task tabs for each sprint, i.e.:

When adopting this strategy, you will also want a Task tab for “Product Backlog” to contain tasks that have been proposed, but not picked up for a sprint. Tasks can be moved between boards by selecting Move Task from the ellipsis menu.

Then, select the sprint plan to move it to:

However, a modified approach that works well with MS Planner is to create a bucket for the Product Backlog and each Sprint:

Under this approach, you can move tasks from the product backlog to the current sprint by dragging and dropping them. Additionally, use the built-in progress tools to mark the task as “Not Started”, “In Progress”, or “Done”, mirroring the Kanban categories. This will also make the charts for your bucket show progress:

In any case, tasks can (and should) be assigned to team members as they work on them (you can have more than one assigned team member).

Pick a strategy that works for your team - but be sure to use it! The TA will be reviewing your task boards as part of your process fidelity grade.