What is an Agile Board?

An Agile Board is a way of visualizing the tasks within a project. By using this type of visual framework, one can have a clear understanding of who is responsible for each task. As shown in Figure 1, there often are a few different columns that each task can live in. When a task is created, it is given a name and often a larger description that details what exactly needs to be accomplished. The task first lives in the Backlog, which describes all of the tasks needed to complete the sprint at hand. A task usually then gets assigned to a team member or a group of team members and is placed in the Active column. When that task is completed, it gets moved to the Resolved column. Usually, when a task is in the Resolved column, it passes a series of quality tests to ensure that the job that was supposed to be done was done well. If it doesn’t get accepted by those tests, it gets moved back to the Active column and it is detailed why it wasn’t accepted. If on the other hand it passes the necessary tests, the task gets moved to the Closed column and is fully completed.

The Agile board is a subset of the Agile philosophy, a way of doing project management. The philosophy largely centers around being able to iterate quickly and quickly gather feedback for your product such that it can be developed and improved at a quick pace.

Fig. 1. An Agile board demonstrating tasks being assigned to different contributors of the team.