Story Cards, Story Wall, Stand-up Meeting

It’s quite some time since I  am learning the process, terminology and environment here in ThoughtWorks. When I entered the company one thing which I found very weird was postcards on wall or board. These walls are called Story walls. There would be some heading and few postcards under them in yellow or red or pink colour. Then around 10 am in the morning I see bunch of people standing next to the wall and speaking one at a time and then they would move some card from one column to another. I wasn’t understanding what is going on ???? But then during my boot camp session I was told about something called stand up meeting and those postcards are nothing but Story cards.

To those who are pretty old enough in Testing field and very new to Agile methodology, Story card is a way of representing a small implementable unit of a feature. Even a bug can be a put up in a form of card on the Story Wall under proper column (probably Testing). I have put down a image at the bottom of this article which represent the Story wall and can give you guys a visualization of that. (Thanks to Google and TWers who has uploaded this.)

Every morning there is a Stand up meeting in which team member discusses 3 things a) what they have done yesterday b) what they will be doing today c) if there are any blockage ?  One quick information, these meetings are called stand up because people are generally standing to form a circular group to give update noticing that others time is important and also to keep the update short because your legs will start paining if you stand up for a longer time ;-) . In short it’s an indication to keep the meeting “KISS” (Keep It Simple & Short).

This is how a typical day in agile methodology starts…