ServiceNow's Agile board is a valuable tool for tracking development and testing tasks within Agile projects. However, for organizations seeking a more visual and flexible approach to track stories through the entire lifecycle, a freeform Visual Task Board can be a powerful complement.

Leveraging the Agile Board for Development and Testing

The Agile board provides a structured view of your development and testing activities. By creating lanes for different stages like “Ready,” “Work In Progress,” “Testing,” and “Complete,” you can easily visualize the progress of your stories. Additionally, you can assign tasks to team members, set due dates, and track their status.

Introducing the Freeform Visual Task Board for OCM, Deployment, and Validation

While the Agile board is excellent for development and testing, it may lack the flexibility needed to track stories through the OCM process, deployment to others outside of the standard Dev and Test environments, such as UAT, Staging, and Production, and final validation/acceptance. This is where a freeform Visual Task Board can be a game-changer.

A freeform Visual Task Board allows you to create custom lanes and columns to represent the specific stages in your OCM and deployment processes. You can visually track the movement of stories through these stages, ensuring that all necessary steps are completed before final acceptance.

As stories are developed and tested, they are moved to the Complete lane and copied to the freeform board.

Key Benefits of Combining Agile Board and Visual Task Board

• End-to-end visibility: Gain a comprehensive view of your stories from development to final acceptance.
• Improved collaboration: Foster better collaboration between development, testing, OCM, and deployment teams.
• Enhanced tracking: Track the progress of stories through each stage of the lifecycle.
• Increased efficiency: Streamline your processes and reduce bottlenecks.

Implementing the Combined Approach

To effectively use both the Agile board and Visual Task Board, consider the following steps:

1. Define your workflow: Clearly outline the stages involved in your development, testing, OCM, deployment, and validation processes.
2. Create the freeform board & lanes: Create lanes for your specific needs to track stories once they have been developed and tested in QA and moved to the “Complete” lane on the Agile board.
3. Add completed stories to the freeform board: As stories complete the development cycle and are ready for an OCM and/or deployment process, you can ‘copy’ each story from the Agile board to the freeform board by opening the story, and selecting “Add to Visual Task board”.
   
   1. Note: The original story is still the one being updated (e.g., work notes can continue to be added to the story from the freeform board, but the original story state will remain as it was on the original Agile board)
4. Track progress: Progress is tracked visually on the freeform board to show story progress across OCM, UAT, and Prod deployments (or whatever lanes you have configured).
   
   1. Note: On the Agile board, if a story is moved to Complete and you end a current sprint and start a new one, the story will drop off the Agile board, but will still be visible on the freeform board - provided you added to the freeform board before closing the sprint!

By combining the Agile board and Visual Task Board, you can gain a powerful tool for tracking your stories through the entire lifecycle, ensuring a smoother and more efficient process.‍

Interested to learn more? Write to our experts at chat@rapdev.io.