Wallboard

Our Wallboard

We’ve found over the years that there are certain pieces of information that is useful for developers to have to hand, and be alerted to when those things change. We have this in a very ‘WDS like’ manner with our dev wallboards;

This shows us the following information:

• A message field (that can contain pictures) for quick messages that need to be shared
  
• Current status of the builds that are important to us
  
• Warnings if the current build takes longer than expected or causes sonar issues
  
• Current status of application instances that are important to us
  
• The numbers of support tickets and deployment requests
  
• Number of logs being made to our reporting database (to recognise issues quickly)
  
• Who is providing support duties for the week
  
• The status of our progress that week (and velocity statistics)
  
• Gamification of commits (to promote continuous delivery practice of commit and pushing (to master) little and often)
  
• The time in our development office locations worldwide
  
• There is also a panel that can be used for sharing YouTube videos and QI style alerts
  

Most of this is subject to audio feedback when it changes. We get feedback from soundbites provided by Alan Partridge, Will Ferrell or Jose (an eagled eyed former developer) alerting people to changes in the status of the above information.

We also use another page in the wallboard for planning sessions, you can read more about that here

We are aware as our attempts to improve our delivery processes continue this is an area we will need to be sharing too. I think the realisation that we find the rest of this useful made it worth sharing, and if anyone has any suggestions of manners of improving this it would be appreciated.

I hope this helps. Feel free to comment, share and discuss

Chris Watkins