Using a wallboard or information radiator helps everyone on the team see, at a glance, the state of the project and receive feedback from important systems. They can visualise the build pipeline, show the state of feature development for the team or highlight real-time metrics for an online service.
The Hindsight board via the Jira Wallboard plugin
These information radiators are often put together with what spare hardware, then coupled to a large TV screen in a prominent work area. Using the Jira Wallboard plugin you can easily turn any Jira dashboard, including your GreenHopper boards into an information radiator giving you constant valuable real-time feedback.
Instead of wasting a lot of energy running this information on older hardware however, Hindsighthad the idea to create a low cost and highly energy efficient way of driving an information radiator. The recent release of the Raspberry PI gave them the idea for their latest project.
The Raspberry Pi
With PCs using between 60-300 watts of power they are not the most power efficient compared to the Raspberry’s 2 watts. The Raspberry Pi also has interface point that can be used to drive build bunnies and other physical objects that warn you about failing tests and code.
The physical size of the Raspberry Pi makes it easy to mount on the back of the TV and a USB connection allows for a wireless mouse and keyboard to be attached. If you want to get really snazzy, you could even try wire it up to a Microsoft Kinect and try the hands free control of your GreeHopper board.
The Wallboard
The Hindsight wallboard has two dashboards configured in Jira and they run as a continuous slide-show. The dashboards contain the following really great Jira gadgets to give just the right amount of information for the team.
- GreenHopper Agile Gadget (for a Sprint Burndown graph)
- GreenHopper Rapid Board (current sprint task in swim-lanes)
- Activity stream
- Several Jira Query Language Filter Results
Summary
Using GreenHopper really helps get things done at StoryIQ. By visualising the work it creates many opportunities for innovation and feedback on value delivered.
Discover how to set up your own Raspberry Pi Information radiator.
Why not give GreenHopper a try and visualise your key tasks, sharing them with the whole team or wider enterprise using the Jira Wallboards plugin. It’s amazing the kind of valuable feedback you can get.