We recently introduced a legend and some new symbol avatars to our board to clearly visualise the state of a user story inside it’s relevant swim lane. The reason we did this was that we wanted to help the members of our team and our stakeholders understand the state of a story just by looking at the card.

Here are the symbols we are using:

• A play button symbol to represent that a story is ready to kickoff.
• An i for information to represent that someone needs more information or to clarify something about the story. This is handy if a stakeholder or peer is not available to answer a question.
• A stop symbol to represent that a story is blocked and can’t proceed until further action is taken.
• A pondering face to represent that a story needs estimation. As we are a DevOps team there is an element of unplanned support work that comes in mid iteration which can sometimes require estimation.

These symbols have begun to work well for us and all of this has got me thinking – do you or your team use symbols on your board? What are they?