Ron Jeffries recently posted something to the scrum developers list, where he made reference to his article on Big Visible Charts. It’s a good article, and looks at a variety of presentations of metrics in an agile project. It took me back to Edward Tufte‘s Envisioning Information. (His other good books on the subject include Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information). It’s often very hard for agile workers to communicate status to people without too much reliance on “inside” jargon. Some of these principles and presentation mechanisms are quite helpful. Also of note is Marty Andrew’s site, also on Big Visible Charts which contains many other and useful presentation approaches.

As practitioners and advocates of agile approaches, or as people considering the use of agile, the presentation of real status of an effort is crucial. The more of, and the more creative solutions that we can use to present this, the better we can communicate the real business value that the stakeholders are receiving.