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
Combinations and arrangements Everything designed has an element of arbitrariness in its form. Loewy described how groups of his designers used to go about designing a new model automobile. Different groups were given different tasks, such as the front and rear of the car, and the conceptual work began, to be cut off at some predetermined time by deadlines that were imposed at the outset. After a time, there were "piles of rough sketches," and Loewy saw the design proceed as follows: Now the important process of elimination begins. From the roughs, I select the designs that indicate germinal direction. Those that show the greatest promise are studied in detail, and these in turn are used in combination or arrangements with one another. A promising front treatment can be tried in combination with a likely side elevation sketch, etc. From this a new set of designs emerges. These are then sketched in detail. After careful analysis, they boil down to four or five. Raymond Loewy, The Evolution of Useful Things Useless work on useful things drawing