We started with the Strategic Initiative research project “Agile Tools for Agile Methods” (SI-ATAM) some years ago. In a broad interview study in the industry we analysed how agile project teams are collaborating and communicating in their daily work. To our surprise, we saw that 90% of the teams are still using physical whiteboards for their agile meetings.

For distributed meetings they were setting up complex infrastructure like video conferences, projectors and microphones. To make things even more complicated, although they used sophisticated and complex issue tracking softwares, they printed out their cards, set up physical boards, made hand notes on the cards and re-captured them into digital tools. They invested a lot of time and effort to keep everything in sync. This time could have been used much more effectively.

We not only analysed their daily work, we also asked our participants how an ideal digital card wall solution should look like – and we listened carefully. This was the birth of aWall and our spin-off company, aTouch Dynamics. Knowing this, we set out on our mission: to provide the digital card board solution needed by modern team based agile collaboration. Our vision is that agile teams can seamlessly collaborate as a team either co-located or distributed with no waste of time and resources.

 Our product aWall supports agile meetings on large interactive multi-touch displays. Through years of research and discussions with industry experts, we came as close as possible to unifying the flexibility of physical boards, enriching it with the intelligence of digital devices. All the information needed is on the board–and is always online! Just collaborate!