The power of a whiteboard | Hacker News Reader

The power of a whiteboard

agile-software-development.com

24 pointsdhotson13 comments

I remember being somewhat underwhelmed when interviewing at a Hedge Fund where they had leather seats decorating a beautiful inlaid wooden table, and not a white board on the whole floor - reminded me of Feynmans comparison of Princeton versus CalTech..

Apparently at Caltech they had a cheap accelerator, but they got great results, because the physicists knew it inside out and tinkered on a daily basis.

I did spend a year doing what Id describe as 'guerrilla white-board driven architecture' where we basically argued hammer and tong for three hours a day, putting ideas up and tearing them down. So every module and code interface was nutted out in detail and usually simplified. It seemed to keep a team of 12 developers focussed on building the same thing. A smaller wb was used to keep a simple list of what the teams working on. Backed up by an open Plone intranet this brought us to delivery. Probably more suited to medium size teams as in game dev. Part of the success was having done a prototype beforehand.

Whenever I see a w/b covered in those cute little pink and green post-it notes, my reaction is that they are embracing agile too rigidly - that the focus is 'process' not action. Its not a white board if theres nowhere to write, right?

So I think the main benefit is simply that the board, being blank, beckons you to draw whatever idea is bouncing around, which you then have to explain...

Great writeup. I have a whiteboard in my bedroom so I can visualize ideas. There's something about putting it on the white space that makes them easier to edit and play with.

With loose blank A4 pages and a pencil you don't have to stand up. In my experience, it works better if it's paper printed on the other side picked from the recycle bin.

I find for brainstorming with myself, regular paper (or and roll 11" wide - I found a few for free and they last FOREVER)is best, but with a bunch of people the whiteboard works better.

I am somewhat hampered on the whiteboard by my incredible lack of drawing ability, but it still works out.

I have been contemplating this. I use your method, including the part where the paper has printing on the other side! And I agree: I don't like the part where I would have to stand up to use the whiteboard.

But the erasing part is great, as is the enormous amount of real estate that a big whiteboard gives you.

I've been thinking of trying arrays of index cards and/or post-it notes taped to the desk. But I'm afraid it would cause my thoughts to shape themselves to the contours of tiny little boxes.

I may also give up and create a desk covered in white melamine.

"reminded me of Feynmans comparison of Princeton versus CalTech.."

Pardon me for being pedantic, but I believe he was comparing MIT and Princeton.

I talked early NetApp into covering all the side walls of the main conference room with whiteboard.

One of the interesting behaviors that I noticed that no one else seems to have commented upon is that the level of activity around a large expanse of whiteboard is related to overall mood.

When things are going well, folks are drawn to whiteboard, looking for interaction and information.

When things are going badly, they'll avoid it.

I've had a similar experience. We do use some software tools to help us with the process, but I would feel very comfortable managing a moderately sized team doing Agile development using nothing but a whiteboard. It's still my teams go-to tool when we need to create ad-hoc lists of "this is the critical list of defects to fix prior to the release" type of lists, as well as hammering out architecture decisions.

That said, I now have one member of my team who is remote full time. That has made it a little less useful. We use Skype and a Logitech webcam, which helps him to be able to see the whiteboard, but he can't really participate in the drawing and writing. I'd love a two-way digital whiteboard, but alas those are fairly pricy.

If anyone has worked with teams like this (majority of the team on site, one or two remote), I'd love to hear suggestions on how you've overcome these problems (if in fact, you have).

I'm kind of lucky in that I can watch dozens of teams simultaneously. So I've seen various combinations.

Here are some ideas:

- Open line. Teams leave a VOIP or regular phone line open on a PolyCom in the middle of the room on both ends. If the equipment is good enough, this gives you some ambient noise from both sites.

- Open cam. If you've got the bandwidth, use it. An open cam, especially one that can be controlled over the web (not that anybody uses it, but heck, its cool) lets both sides keep an eye on what's going on. You can make use of an old spare notebook to do this if you like.

- We're all in standups together. If you do a morning coffee or standup or group breakfast or whatever, the remote folks are part of that too. Lots of time the most critical information gets discussed in the most relaxed informal venues.

- VR. I've got two teams that are using Virtual Reality for team colaborative space. While they're using Second Life, I guess you could use anything like that. I have lots of comments on this idea, but I'm saving them for a blog entry :)

- Adapt. Don't be afraid to try something and then throw it away. I don't think there's one answer that fits all situations, so the critical factor here is the creativity and adaptivity of the teams involved. Try some ideas you think are good and see how it works. Heck, try some ideas you think suck and see how it works. Lots of times our initial estimate of how much something is going to help or not is way different than reality.

Hope that helps some. Drop me a line if you'd like to hear more pontificating :)

Great article, spot on. Given the high-tech nature of my (our) work, I find it amusing that whenever people ask me, "what software do you use to track X" or "how do you manage your tasks efficiently" I just say, "I use a whiteboard."

And it works too.

I almost read it as "The power of a white beard". Which sounds appropriate in the software industry.

Anyway, a whiteboard is not just great for software development. It's good because it makes it easy to share thoughts among participants. It helps to encourage participation, visualizing of concepts, and the very act of writing down ideas also helps the writer to build his/her own idea more concretely.

When we build up our office in my last workplace, I made sure we had writable glass surfaces for our walls in the conference room. I'd wanted it on our tables too, but thought it would be quite dirty. Everyone who came to our office liked and used it.

When I was shopping around for standalone whiteboards, I was surprised to find a few variations, other than those whiteboards that you can attach a printer, save to flashdrives, auto-erase, there was a kind (not a "board" anymore, but it served as one) where you stick 2-3 attachments onto a normal wall and used a special pen for drawing on the wall. You had to have a projector and a laptop for it to work. You can draw with the pen on the wall, and the software will capture it onto the laptop, projecting it onto the wall, pretty cool.

At ThoughtWorks Chicago nearly the entire perimeter wall interior surface is floor-to-ceiling whiteboard wallpaper.

It's magnificent.

I liked the article -- full of good advice.

My only nit is the author's bold-facing every fourth word or so. It got distracting.

One of the harder things to do in a large company when introducing agile is to get people back to the whiteboard. Large non-agile teams are so used to having their own electronic tools and document templates that when you ask them to work "without a crutch"? It's like speaking in Klingon.

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