Why we stopped breaking down stories into tasks An Article by Adam Silver adamsilver.io The Scrum process says to break down stories into tasks to make estimation easier, encourage collaboration and to be able to show more granular progress during a sprint. But after a few sprints, we decided to do the next sprint without creating tasks. As a result we drastically increased our velocity and never went back. Here I'll jot down some of the reasons we decided to do this: Breaking down stories into tasks is time consuming The tasks we came up with invariably would change as we worked on the stories Tasks are repetitive Tasks were often carried out in parallel Our estimates didn't improve It decluttered our task board It encouraged collaboration throughout the sprint While we started our process by following Scrum to the letter, we soon realised that breaking down stories into tasks was something that wasn’t worthwhile for us. In the end we realised that it was overplanning and poor use of our time. In the end we used that time to get on with the work and deliver at a significantly faster pace. Why We Don't Do Daily Stand-Ups at Supercede agile
A web of books A proof of concept for an RSS-like books feed Thinking through building some kind of “web of books” I realized that we could use something similar to RSS to build a kind of decentralized GoodReads powered by indie sites and an underlying easy to parse format. I created a proof of concept by converting my own bookshelf into a JSON file https://tomcritchlow.com/library.json. If you think of several sites publishing their bookshelf as a library.json file you can imagine a bookshelf “feed reader” that let’s you keep track of friends bookshelves readingcontentwww