program selection system

Agile Planner for digital tabletop (APDT) is an agile planning tool supporting collocated and distributed agile planning meetings. Utilizing digital tabletop technology, APDT supports group interactions and natural behavior of agile meeting attendees. APDT connects tabletops at different locations, creating a virtual-collocated platform that integrates distributed agile teams into a shared meeting scenario. APDT is a novel planning tool that addresses communication problems found in distributed agile planning meetings. An evaluation of APDT has been conducted and the overall feedback is very positive.

In agile development models, planning meetings play an essential role in establishing a concrete understanding of customers’ requirements. Story cards are traditionally used to arrange tasks and feature requests into iterations. In a collocated agile planning meeting, attendees often create story cards and spread them on a table surface to organize them in iterations and releases. Moving a story card from one position to another on the table surface for grouping or prioritizing purposes is a very common practice. Also, because of the circular setting of the meeting around the tabletop, reorienting story cards to make them easier to read for some collaborators is another common practice.

However, in a distributed agile planning meeting, behavior observed in a collocated agile environment has to change. For example, paper index cards on one table are not visible at another location. While there are currently many computer tools that support a distributed agile planning meetings, most of the tools are using desktop computers which provide a small, vertical display with a limted output resolution and a single mouse & keyboard for input. Compared with a large, horizontal table surface available for a collocated agile planning meeting, a desktop display is very small and limits information sharing. Moreover, using a desktop computer, teams have to share a single keyboard-mouse. That is not as natural as using hands to work on a touch sensitive table surface.

To solve the problem exposed in a distributed agile planning meeting, we developed Agile Planner for Digital Tabletops (APDT), a digital tabletop based agile planning tool. Utilizing APDT on a reasonably sized digital tabletop allows collaborators to create, edit, move, rotate, toss and delete index cards just like they would do with paper artifacts. The added benefit of using a digital tool to facilitate planning (instead of paper index cards) is the ability to share a workspace over distance as well as improved progress tracking in distributed environments without a need to transcribe cards after the planning meeting. APDT provides a multimodal input system that supports gesture-, handwriting- and speech recognition as alternative input methodologies to conventional user interface widgets.

In summary, the APDT integrates the computer based agile planning tools with the digital tabletop and thus provides a more natural environment (large, horizontal, touch sensible and multi-control screen ) to support interactive practices observed in a collocated agile planning meetings.

**In the attached short paper, we illustrate the features of APDT in more detail.