Moving beyond tasks
One of the most common agile anti-patterns I witness is a compulsion towards breaking user stories into tasks. Tasks take focus away from stories The problem with tasks is that they take the focus away from user stories. Teams that focus on completing tasks risk losing sight of the real value which lies in the stories. They are often unable to see the wood for the trees. How often have you seen sprints that are? • On day 9 of 10, but <30% of story points are complete • On day 5 of 10, but <10% of story points are complete • On day 9 of 10, with 90% of tasks complete, but still <30% of story points complete I firmly believe this is a by-product of too much focus on tasks and not enough focus on stories. Tasks themselves add little or no value on their own. I often see tasks such as “Manual QA”, “Code Review”, “Write test cases”, “Database work”, “Front end work”, “Back end work”. People often argue to me that the task breakd