agile

Innovation as Easy as Raspberry Pi

One use of the information radiator displays the Hindsight rapid board view. This board has a column to show features branches (issues) that need to be merged back to master and we conduct peer code reviews at this stage (using pull requests) and the non-assignee will perform the merge and close the issue. We use JIRA workflow rules to enforce this with the help of the visual workflow designer.

Hindsight, a startup in the London Silicon Roundabout, are a great example of how Atlassian software has helped companies get productive quickly. Our GreenHopper and JIRA software help Hindsight manage their work and focus on the most valuable activities to gauge how much return they are getting from the investment they put into their ideas.

To keep everyone up to date and heading in the same direction, especially with all the change happening within a start-up, can be a challenge. Even great tools like JIRA benefit from the wider visualisation of key information, helping drive engagement with the work as a whole and getting faster feedback so the team can stay on track. Hindsight saw real advantage in adopting GreenHopper, giving them an easily way to visualise their workflows and keep things on track.

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

The Raspberry Pi a low-powered credit card sized computer on a chip that is really capturing the imagination of developers and start-ups - and even enterprise scale companies such as IBM.

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)

In Summary

Using GreenHopper really helps get things done at Hindsight. 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.

Thank you.
@jr0cket

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 ShareAlike License, including custom images & stylesheets. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at @jr0cket
Creative Commons License