StoryWall - cards on a wall. But, like, totally digital. | Hacker News Reader

StoryWall - cards on a wall. But, like, totally digital.

storywallapp.com

21 pointstobyhede22 comments

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!

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.

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)

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.

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.

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).

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.

>Took a little while to understand that the buttons at the top all work via drag/drop. //

Took me until I read your post. I tried drag-drop but not to the bottom 25% of the card.

It looks like that bottom area used to hold the tags/labels isn't used for anything else so perhaps a drop-zone of a dotted outline of equal size to one of the tags would increase the affordance? Personally I think it would work better to click the drop-zone and then choose from a grid of tags.

Also, clicking to remove a tag brings up the same warning as clicking to remove a card does. Can you attach sub-items to tags as the warning intimates?

I am definitely not happy with the affordance on those token targets ... spent a couple of days trying to bend something together that works better, but I think I was lacking the critical insight of not using drag and drop for tokens - the idea of "click and select" could work really well.

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.

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.

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?

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 ...

Well said, thanks!

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.

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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).

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