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.
Radić's texts are almost always assemblages of several pieces or paragraphs that, although written by an architect, do not attempt to refer to a particular project or work (and if they do, it is always laterally, avoiding explanations of the how and the why, or demonstrations and apologies).
Like notes from a fragmentary diary or a review of a collection of memories, at times they share the melancholy tone of the writings by Aldo Rossi and at other times they recall the obscure density of John Hejduk's poems.
There are places I will never go. Due to laziness or boredom, or premature fatigue. But there are also landscapes or buildings I should have visited a long time ago. This text reviews those possible places. All of them are part of my story, and they are places I am familiar with in one way or another.