By A few days ago the BBC internet blog published a blog post about designing the new BBC homepage. The article itself is worth a read but what caught my eye is the photo of their sprint board.
The columns are very similar to ours:
We don’t have a “not started” column instead we have a massive backlog from which the top tasks are taken and somewhere down the list is a commitment point for the current sprint. But everything before this point is equivalent to the “not started” column.
We also have a single “QA” column rather than a “dev check” and “verify” column. I’m not sure if the “dev” they are referring to is the developer who implemented the task and the “verify” is another developer or the “dev” is a different developer doing peer review, and then the “verify” is the product owner (I suspect it is the later). Our requirements are slightly different since as we can’t rely on our customers being around to verify our progress on a day to day basis.
Our “In progress” column includes a dev check by the developer who implemented the task and a peer review (currently informal chat depending on the task). The “QA” is for a separate developer to test and provide quality assurance.
“Done” for us then means that its on the demo server and ready to be shown to the customer at the end of sprint demo, so I guess our “done” is equivalent to their “verify”. Since we often can’t get verification from the customer until the end of the sprint it makes having a distinction meaningless within a sprint, since nothing can ever be done.
I might suggest that we introduce a separate column for “dev check” which is a dedicated peer review column.
I’ld love to see a better photo of the second board and a blog post about their agile processes.