Carl Bruiners Agile / IT Development Consultant

Amber is heathly, green means we’ve over cooked it and red means we haven’t got a clue

Picking up on Simon Cromarty, aka the Agile Pirate, blog about Yellow is the new Green, I had an additional take on his work, where Yellow (or Amber if you use RAG) is the most healthy status depending on how you use the status.

Is Yellow or Amber used in your business to flag early failure warning? Or could it be used to flag that there is some uncertainty over a work effort? As we are Agile people we don't want to spend to much time on the requirements of our work so that we have every last peice documented. So instead of using RAG / RYG as a measurement of failure, if we rework this would could have it measure a teams uncertainty around a story;

• Green - Over cooked, too much time spent on defining the story
• Amber / Yellow - We know enough to be able to flag that we know a fair bit but that there's still some undefined areas
• Red - We haven't got a clue and are screaming for help