One of the key fundamentals of an Agile project is that the overall task is broken down into iterations, typically 1–2 week blocks of work. At the start of each iteration, the development team decides with the business what work is to be undertaken, and then demonstrates it at the end.
Working in such a manor allows a team to self organize - work for the current iteration is split into stories and written on story cards. Developers can then pull off cards as they progress through the iteration and develop the new features. These cards are kept on a story board, typically a white board with index or post-it notes on.
As a developer works on an item, they move their avatar over it. This enables everyone in the team to see at a glance who is doing what. You can create avatars easily at a number of websites, and provide the team with a fun task involving colouring, cutting and gluing as you mount the avatars on to the story board.
Here’s an example of an avatar I’ve used previously:
Creating Your Avatar
Whilst working on a project last year, the team I was in decided it was important to make sure your avatar didn’t look like yourself - the idea being that it obfuscated who was doing what to the outside world.
Doing so would help streamline the development process by making sure people would slot in work for the next iteration with the project manager, rather than being tempted to go directly to developers. Developers are generally an optimistic bunch and try to slip in features when possible (or not).
This was an important idea that I decided to incorporate into my continuous integration monitor - the status of builds can be shown by avatars rather than the SVN user who checked in the code.