I think something is lost when we use a digital vs. a physical workflow board in Scrum. One of the things we lose is an instant view into how the sprint is progressing. There is nothing like a well-organized and up to date board for showing you how things are going, how close or how far away the team is to achieving the sprint goal. It is the ultimate and the original information radiator. Most digital tools, and especially the most popular one these day (Jira), just do not have a good view of the whole board that is as easy to take in (in its entirety) or drill down to detail as a physical board. Jira gets lost in swimlanes and other “features” that make viewing the whole board at one go impossible unless you have a gigantic monitor. But this is just one of the things that is lost.
Another, and perhaps more important, loss is the centralized sense of community that a physical board brings. As team members move their stories across a board, they talk to each other. They can all see the whole board and take it in while they are focusing on moving their own work. They meet at the board, they talk at the board, they plan at the board. There just is no comparison to it digitally.
When you have a physical board, you do not need to worry about a sprint burndown. You can see it in front of you every time you look at it with no additional effort.
I could go on, but I am sure I am starting to sound like someone railing against photography over oil paintings and am in danger of making myself sound out of touch. But that is exactly my last point, touch. The visceral feel of moving work across the board is satisfying, much more so when planting something in the “Done” column vs. a few mouse clicks.
The only real reason why physical boards are out of favor in the industry is the prevalence of geographically dispersed teams, which is a subject of a later post, but I bet you can guess how I feel about those too.