Benefits of card walls in agile software development. A systematic literature review

Abstract

Card walls are often used to visualize various aspects of the software development process. They are an essential and widespread agile practice. Despite the drawback of physical card walls, its digital version is often not considered a sufficient alternative. This paper aims to find the reason for this and suggests how to evolve digital card walls into a viable alternative. We conducted a systematic literature review and analyzed twenty-two studies. We identified which desirable effects agile teams get from card wall usage and derived a set of properties a card wall needs to achieve those effects. Furthermore, we suggested a typology of card walls to compare the benefits and challenges among them.