Mirror Force: A Visual Tool to Aid Scrum Teams

Abstract

Agile practitioners focus on working code rather than spending too much time with tools. Nonetheless, gaining and maintaining awareness is essential for the success of Agile software projects. A way to do so is through dashboards, a useful project management tool. This research studies the relationship between Agile team members with their tools and provides a solution for those teams. Overall, this research answers the following question: How are Scrum teams affected by their tools and how can dashboards aid those teams? To collect the necessary data, we have conducted semi¬structured interviews with twelve individuals from six different companies so that we could outline characteristics of the tools being used. The findings from the interviews, mixed with the theory of Information Visualization and Scrum inspired the design of our prototype, named Mirror Force. Later, the prototype was evaluated, through a usability test followed by a group interview. From the individual interviews, we have identified 11 categories of requirement and constraints in the tools being used. The solution was designed in the form of an integrated ceremony¬based dashboard system. From the usability test, we have found that some design heuristics were successfully applied in the prototype, however, the dashboard that represented the work of the Product Owner did not fully succeed due to the addition of elements that were still unknown by the participants. While the research process was conducted with rigor, several challenges were faced in order to manage the relationship with the participating companies. Although it did not deeply impact our data gathering process, we continuously had to make adjustments to our data gathering plan. The evaluation of our prototype, however, showed us the potential of the solution where an assortment of directions could be taken in order to create a product useful for Scrum teams.