UNDERSTANDING THE DIGITAL CARDWALL FOR AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT by Stevenson Gossage A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulllment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF COMPUTER SCIENCE School of Computer Science at CARLETON UNIVERSITY Ottawa, Ontario May, 2014 © Copyright by Stevenson Gossage, 2014 Table of Contents List of Tables v List of Figures vi Abstract vii Acknowledgements viii Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation . 1 1.2 Research Outline . 2 1.3 Thesis Structure . 2 Chapter 2 Background 4 2.1 Agile Software Development . 4 2.2 Storycards . 8 2.3 The Process of Stories . 9 2.4 Physical Cardwalls . 11 2.5 Digital Cardwalls and Story Repositories . 15 2.5.1 Agile Planner for Digital Tabletop . 15 2.5.2 Collaborative Multi-touch Agile Planner . 16 2.5.3 Trello . 19 2.5.4 Story Repositories . 21 Chapter 3 The Pilot Study 24 Chapter 4 Field Study of Digital Cardwall Users 27 4.1 Motivation . 27 4.2 Research Questions . 28 4.3 Method . 28 ii 4.3.1 Participants . 28 4.3.2 Procedure . 29 4.3.3 Analysis . 30 4.3.4 Ethics Approval . 31 4.4 Results . 31 4.4.1 Overview . 31 4.4.2 Themes Identied . 38 4.4.3 Analysis Bias . 53 4.5 Research Questions Answered . 53 4.5.1 Distributed Agile Teams . 53 4.5.2 Usability of Digital Cardwalls . 54 4.5.3 New or Improved Features . 54 Chapter 5 Implications for Design 55 5.1 Digital Cardwalls . 55 5.2 Challenges in Presenting Detailed Information . 57 5.3 Exploring and Filtering Information . 60 5.4 Managing Backlogs . 61 5.5 Multi-disciplinary use of Stories . 64 5.6 Keeping the Cardwall Updated . 66 5.7 Summary . 67 Chapter 6 Interacting with Surface Technologies 72 6.1 Collaboration for Surface Interactions . 73 6.2 Pointing and selecting . 75 6.3 Gesturing . 78 6.4 Hovering . 83 6.5 Text . 85 6.6 Identity of the interactor . 86 6.7 Issues Arising for Digital Cardwalls . 90 iii Chapter 7 Conclusions 91 7.1 Overview . 91 7.2 Discussion . 91 7.2.1 Relationships . 92 7.2.2 Backlog . 92 7.2.3 Limitations . 93 7.2.4 Future Work . 94 7.3 Contributions . 94 Bibliography 95 iv List of Tables 4.1 Organizations Visited . 32 4.2 Project Table . 33 4.3 Team Table . 33 4.4 Demographic Information For Interviewees . 36 4.5 Observation Table . 37 4.6 Interview Table . 37 4.7 Codes used in the analysis of our data grouped by Themes . 38 5.1 Summary of the guidelines and support from them in Trello and JIRA with JIRA Agile. (F: full support, P: partial support and N: not sup- ported) . 71 v List of Figures 2.1 Workow comparison between Waterfall, XP and Scrum [thanks to www.ickr.com user kienntbk1983] . 5 2.2 Storycard . 6 2.3 Cardwall . 6 2.4 The Scrum Workow . 11 2.5 Cognitive Dimensions used by Sharp et al. 13 2.6 Custom Gestures . 17 2.7 Minimal Storycard View . 18 2.8 Full Storycard View . 18 2.9 A Trello Cardwall for Household events . 20 2.10 A Trello Agile Cardwall . 20 2.11 Greenhopper Cardwall Plugin for JIRA . 22 2.12 A typical JIRA Cardwall . 23 4.1 A typical JIRA Cardwall . 34 4.2 A story from the StoryBoard Digital Cardwall . 35 4.3 An example of the StoryBoard Digital Cardwall . 35 6.1 Selecting high resolution items with a low resolution pointing device . 77 6.2 FingerGlass: a widget for interacting with large displays . 78 6.3 Wobbrock et al.'s Taxonomy of Surface Gestures . 79 6.4 Hovering in web applications . 82 6.5 Hovering and Google Search . 82 6.6 Hovering in Windows . 83 6.7 A solution to hovering on large displays . 85 6.8 A simple QWERTY virtual keyboard . 86 6.9 Text input on large displays . 87 6.10 A few examples of how IdLenses can be used . 89 vi Abstract In Agile software development, key artefacts used to support the process are the User Story (usually recorded on a Storycard) and Story Cardwall (usually a dedicated portion of a wall). These low-delity tools work together to help teams stay focused and self-manage their projects. The need to support distributed teams and team members makes the physical Cardwall impractical and teams are therefore migrating towards digital story management tools. We wanted to learn how to design a digital Cardwall that leverages the benets of the physical Cardwall, while adding more value with features only possible in a software system. We conducted eld studies of Agile teams and performed qualitative data analysis to understand the needs for digital Cardwalls. We then used these ndings to identify guidelines for future design. vii Acknowledgements I'd like to thank my family for all their support and especially my wife Lucy who has put up with endless late nights and early mornings. I'd also like to thank my colleagues in the Hotsoft lab who are always available and willing to help. I'd like to thank Dr. Sonia Chiasson and Dr. Timothy Lethbridge, members of my thesis examination committee. Their insightful comments, fair questions and feedback helped improve the nal version of this thesis. A special thanks to my supervisor, Dr. Robert Biddle who encouraged me to start on this academic path and who never lost faith even when things were not progressing as expected. Finally, I'd like to thank Dr. Judith Brown, a friend and colleague, with whom I have worked in close collaboration for the past few years. Judith has played a key role in keeping me focused and on track. Without her positive motivation and support I would not have arrived at this point. viii Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Motivation Agile methodologies promise increased productivity for software development teams by pro- viding proven strategies, guidance and best practices. Agile software development teams work iteratively with frequent software releases, which allows their customers to provide frequent input and feedback, ensuring the direction of the project is in-line with customer needs. The customers' other key role helps to drive product development by selecting key features for developers to implement in the next iteration. At the root of the Agile tool-set, is the User Story (usually recorded on a Storycard) and Story Cardwall (usually a dedicated portion of a wall). These low-delity tools work together to help teams stay focused and self-manage their projects. The Cardwall helps to foster awareness and encourages transparency by acting as an information radiator, where the User Stories are on display and stakeholders can easily track the progress of the development work. User Stories are the fundamental unit of work, they are written from the user's perspective, by the customer and intended to represent some functionality that a specic user would need while interacting with the system. The story is role-based, high-level, and end-user oriented. The story is a small, but important, part of the system under development and is intended to encourage better communication with the customer. To this end, the story should be brief, with just enough detail for the developer to understand the big picture, but with enough information that the remaining details could easily come out via further conversations with the customer. Similar to the constant customer feedback possible with frequent releases, the quality and direction of the current software being implemented is guided by the constant conversations required between developer and client. These conversations help ensure that the current iteration will produce working software that meets the customers' expectations. Traditionally, the Story Cardwall is on constant display in a public space preferably close to where the developers work. The Cardwall will typically have columns, representing 1 2 the team's workow and the Storycards are moved from one column to the next as their implementation progresses. In this way, the Cardwall allows the developers and any interested party to quickly understand the state of the current iteration. Physical Storycards and Cardwalls are very low-tech, and often made using sticky-notes for the Storycards; these are ideal since they can be stuck to many surfaces. The physical Cardwall is just as simple, and often, simply occupies empty space on a wall near the developers. The columns and column labels of the Cardwall are made visually distinct using whatever may be available, including masking tape for the columns and larger sticky-notes or simple paper for the labels. Even now, the physical Cardwall is still the recommended tool for Agile teams; however, the need to support distributed teams and team members makes the physical Cardwall impractical and teams are therefore migrating towards digital story management tools. This move toward the digital Cardwall is at the root of the motivation for this thesis. We want to learn how digital Cardwalls are used in practice by professional Agile teams, with a particular focus on understanding user interactions to inform the development of design guidelines for creating better digital Cardwalls. 1.2 Research Outline Our goal was to understand how to design a digital Cardwall. To accomplish this we.