I was introduced to Jimmy Janlen and his work at “Agila Sverige 2015” (a yearly Agile conference in Stockholm, Sweden). Jimmy did a speech called “Visualization bonanza”, where he presented 40 visualization examples in ten minutes! I learned that he was about to write a book, and I immediately got excited since I’m a big fan of visualization myself. When the book called “Visualization Examples” was released, I got hold of a copy and started reading!

Content

The book holds 124 pages focusing on visualization examples, together with some general information. It is really hard to pick which examples to high-light in a review! It depends where your teams are in the Agile journey, and if they are using Scrum or Kanban. Instead I will list five visualizations we are using and can recommend, complemented with five we are curious about and want to try out.

Recommended visualization examples:

• Urgent lane – Some of our teams use this for urgent stuff
• Kaizen board – We use this to keep track of our continuous improvements
• WIP limits – We use swim lanes to limit work in progress (together with avatars)
• Limit by space – Really good to work with this
• Pyramid backlog – We use something similar

Curious about and want to try out:

• Dependency sprider
• Achievement poster
• Review queue
• Today’s trick
• I want to learn

Recommendation

I can truly recommend this book. The format is perfect; focused & really to the point. The book is packed with visualization examples you can start to use today. Jimmy Janlen is THE wizard of visualization!