The garden is as central to the concept of an Islamic home as the hearth is to the European home. It is interesting, then, that the hearth-fire in old traditions has a similar association with the life of the inhabitants of the house.
Commonly, the fire of the hearth was not allowed to go out. It was carefully covered with ashes each night at curfew so that a few selected embers would survive until morning. (In fact, the word "curfew" originated from the French word for cover-the-fire—couvre-feu.) Raglan comments that "the alarm and horror felt if the hearth-fire went out are out of all proportion to the inconvenience caused" by the need to relight it.
Thermal information is not differentiated in our memory; rather it is retained as a quality, or underlying tone, associated with the whole experience of the place. It contributes to our sense of the particular personality, or spirit, that we identify with that place. In remembering the spirit of a place, we can anticipate that if we return, we will have the same sense of comfort or relaxation as before.
Now I sometimes wonder whether the current of utility has not become too strong and whether there would be sufficient opportunity for a full life if the world were emptied of some of the useless things that give it spiritual significance; in other words, whether our conception of what is useful may not have become too narrow to be adequate to the roaming and capricious possibilities of the human spirit.
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.