The importance of visible workspaces

Making work visible in the form of a Scrum Board is one of the most empowering features of Scrum. 

We often call visible workspaces information radiators because they radiate information to anyone within sight of them, as shown in the following figure:

Scrum Boards enable several things to happen:

1. A visible workspace allows a team to debug its process like never before. A team can stand back and take in a complete picture of a Sprint's progress. If you're new to Agile, this gives you information that you've never had before. The visible nature of the work in progress enables you to make better decisions. It's not uncommon to see Scrum teams gathered around the board outside of the Daily Scrum, assessing the state of play and deciding what to do.
2. Stakeholders can also easily assess the work in progress by visiting the Scrum Board. This results in fewer interruptions to the Scrum team.
3. Transparency leads to easier risk management. At a glance, you can determine if an item in progress is blocked and needs assistance, and from the wider perspective, if you're likely to meet the Sprint Goal.

In a non-Agile environment, this information is usually kept online in a project planning tool or spreadsheet, making it less visible.

Online tools can be useful, especially when used for tracking trends over time or when people work remotely. However, we often call online tools, such as Jira, PivotalTracker, Rally, or Trello (to name a few), information refrigerators because although they store information well, it's hard to see. You have to go to the fridge, open the door, and poke around. Often, the thing you're looking for is down the back, covered in ice and hard to spot.

The tools that enable you to do this easily are your visible workspaces; in other words, your Scrum Board and your work which is made visible on it. Using the Scrum Board, you can easily track the progress of your User Stories and their related tasks. The completion of a task also feeds into your Sprint Burndown, giving you an idea of how close you are to completion.

We'll look at Sprint Burndown charts and other metrics in more detail in Chapter 6, Metrics that will Help your Software Team Deliver.