I thought of this as I was writing the previous post, but decided that it was important enough that it deserved it’s own discussion.
Another benefit of physical agile boards is that, by their nature, they tend to limit the scope of your planning. To some, this may sound like a bad thing. It is actually one of the most difficult disciplines to maintain in agile development.
One of the things that distinguishes agile development from older development models is that Agile keeps the time horizons close. This is beneficial because the nature of software and systems development is ever changing, and long-term plans are almost always upset by the realities of the industry and of development itself.
Even strong agile teams see opportunities and features that don’t make sense right now, but they know they will want “someday,” The tempting thing in Scrum is to add these into the backlog, so that they aren’t forgotten. In Kanban, they may go into the “not started” column or some other “feature stash” (The Product Owner and I had a secret Trello board called this when I worked on Revel at Adobe). These far-off stories and epics become their own drag on the agile process, slowing down backlog grooming and sprint planning as the backlog becomes less and less manageable and stories get re-added because no one can find anything.
A physical board actually makes it physically difficult to do this kind of faux-waterfall long-term planning. There just isn’t anywhere to put the post-its/cards! The Product Owner may still have their personal feature stash somewhere, but it won’t become a drag on the whole team.
Similarly, the lack of physical space makes it difficult to over-plan the stories that are in front of the team too. When I was doing Scrum as front-line engineering manager, I found it difficult to figure out how many stories we should break down for a sprint in order to not run short. The tendency was always to task out a lot more stories than we needed, just-in-case. The virtual board makes it easy to plan as many stories as you want. In practice, stories have dependencies on each other and if you over-plan, you tend to just write incorrect tasks.
A physical board encourages you to plan just as much as you need, and not much more.
