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
The problem with ornament An Article www.architectural-review.com Contemporary architects are, however, increasingly engaging with ornamentation. The zenith was Grayson Perry and Charles Holland of FAT’s fairytale House for Essex (p64), but it does not serve as an indicator because the involvement of an artist has allowed an enhanced engagement with ornament until it surpasses mere decoration and becomes embodied in the architecture in a way that architects do not allow themselves to do. Think of FAT’s old work: the ornament is all contained within a surface - a facade - which allowed them to separate out the (Modernist) architecture from the (kitsch) superficiality of the elevation. Like Venturi before them, their ornament allowed them to have their ornamentally iced cake - and eat the Minimal Modernist sponge underneath. It passes by the river ornamentarchitectureart