Scrum-board / Task Board and Color Coding [closed]

Question

What would you recommend as far as a good color-coding for use on a Storyboard?

Is this a good pattern from your experience?
http://maxheapsize.com/static/ScrumBoardCheatSheet.pdf
What is the most standard color-coding?

Answer 1

I suggest white for normal backlog items, i.e. those with business value, and red for bug fixes. This makes mistakes stand out and helps the team improve.

Start simple - as simple as you dare make it - and allow innovations as suggested by the Scrum team during sprint retrospectives. Only one innovation at a time; try it for long enough to see how well it really works; drop them if they aren't truly necessary.

Answer 2

Don't make anything fancy. Use common sense. I haven't used color codes, because I don't think they help much - they even make it more difficult for other stakeholders to understand the taskboard. This leads to less transparency. Otherwise I agree with Morendil.

Answer 3

For Backlog Items I use large post-its (4x4) : User Stories (Blue/Green), Defects (Red), Exceptions (Yellow), Investigational (Purple).

For tasks we use regular sized post-its (3x3) : Dev Tasks (Yellow : Because they are easiest to come by, and most of the board will be Dev Tasks), QA (Green), Design (Blue), Bugs (Pink), ScrumMaster/Impediments (Orange).

We start the sprint with pale/pastel post-its, and anything that is added past sprint planning is done on neon of the same color. So pale yellow vs. neon yellow, and so on. That way we can see what has been added to really highlight if we didn't do a good breakdown or if there were tons of unknowns starting the sprint.

Hope this helps.

Answer 4

I've seen the spectrum when it comes to card colors and breakdowns. Some teams use one card color because a task is a task is a task regardless of work involved. Other teams have colors for each type of task, which I kind of liked since it gave a nice view of the type of work left without having to read each card.

Story cards: blue Technical debt: green Bugs: yellow Analysis: red QA (not story QA, but tasks that QA's did outside of normal QA): white

This helped when we had a large team with a number of non-developers sitting around the table.

Answer 5

I agree the more colors you use the more you are blind. I prefer to highlite defects, stories and epics. In sprint backlog there are only two colors - orange for defects and yellow for stories. ScrumDesk for example allows to assign color to a card in story template which is helpfull to keep backlog colored correctly.

The colors are very usable if backlog describes more products (program backlog). In this case colors might highligt epics according product.

Answer 6

It looks overloaded to my taste. When I learned Scrum several years ago, the only color codes were white and red. The red stories were integration stories. If you get too many of those in the product backlog close to each other - you are in trouble. Anyway, I gave up using low-tech board on a very first sprint, because I had remote team members, so we used some electronic format - Excel, TWiki, VersionOne, Rally.