Information Radiators & Information Vaults – Live from Mile High Agile

One of the most common points of confusion for people new to lightweight, collaborative methods is the notion of an “information radiator”. People are accustomed to electronic tools for project planning, tracking work in progress, and managing incidents. They assume they can use the same tools to support development teams’ needs for immediate, volatile information such as current WIP, User Story blockers, and CI build status. When advised to maintain visual management tools in their team work spaces, they consider it duplicate effort. Some simply refuse to set up information radiators, believing it’s easy enough to query information in their project management tool or incident tracking tool. Others try to eliminate “duplication” by printing out highly detailed “story cards” from an electronic tool and posting them on the wall. In reality, there are different kinds of information that are best managed using different kinds of tools. Teams need the immediacy of information radiators so they can respond to issues that come up in real time. They also need access to detailed information about standards, requirements, planned and completed work, and other stable data in a source that is searchable. In this session, we’ll clarify the different categories of information and how information radiators in conjunction with an application lifecycle management tool (ALM) can give teams appropriate access to the information they need.