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 primacy of interpretation over sensation A Fragment by Mark Liberman languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu Our memory of exact word sequences usually fades more quickly than our memory of (contextually interpreted) meanings. More broadly, the exact auditory sensations normally fade very quickly; the corresponding word sequences fade a bit more slowly; and the interpreted meanings last longest. These generalizations can be overcome to some extent if the sound or the text has especially memorable characteristics. (And the question of what "memorable" means in this context is interesting.) memorysensesmeaningspeechwords