Tasks are Dead, Long Live Stories

The worst nightmare for a scrum master or any agile project manager is to find out that at the end of the sprint the 80% of the tasks are done and none of the stories have been finished.

The theory says stories should be split in shorter stories if they don’t fit in a sprint buy I would like to take that a step further… Where possible tasks inside each story should be promoted to stories.

Of course this is not always possible, or is it? It depends on how you plan the tasks in your story, of course if you create a task for every new function you plan to add then you can’t make a story of it but, in the other hand, don’t you think you spend too much time in the scrum board sticking post-its?

Maybe if you have a huge development team that takes a week to coordinate it is impossible but in the other hand if you take a week to coordinate your team you might be doing something wrong.

I don’t know if this is possible in all cases but I think it’s worth just trying to do it. The smaller the story the tighter control you’ll have on the project and the more feedback you’ll get.

Wouldn’t it be nice in the stand up meeting to have the last day’s stories shown? just in a couple of minutes. It will be much better than the usual “yeah, I am still working on that… Good progress… yeah no impediments.”

I will try it. Let’s see how it goes. If it messes up everything I’ll come back and keep you updated and I will finally understand why they didn’t call me to be one of the 17 who created the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.