Why we stopped breaking down stories into tasks

An Article by Adam Silver

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:

  1. Breaking down stories into tasks is time consuming
  2. The tasks we came up with invariably would change as we worked on the stories
  3. Tasks are repetitive
  4. Tasks were often carried out in parallel
  5. Our estimates didn't improve
  6. It decluttered our task board
  7. 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.

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