Bunk and Rambling

It dawned on me recently that we use many different physical devices to make agile practices work for us. These devices are used in support of concepts such as story and task cards, story walls and burn down charts. When you look at the output of implementing a number of agile practices we can clearly see the benefit of index cards, large sheets of paper, whiteboards, marker pens and various other display tools. What we do not see are the things that make this stuff visible to us, the stuff that allows us to display this information on walls rather than on piles on our desks, what I am talking about is Blutack (and its various competitors in the adhesive putty market).

Having pondered upon the value of Blutack to the many projects that I have been involved in, I now believe that current Agile literature does not go far enough to describe the valuable role that Blutack has in implementing their practices successfully and hope that through the power of this blog entry that this oversight can be rectified in future articles and books. In the meantime I would like to ask you all to take some time to think about the value that Bluetack has on your project the next time you stick a story card to a wall or a whiteboard, or even as you play with a ball of Blutack while you think or try to relieve stress, and pay it the respect that it is due.