The Art of Agile Development, 2nd Edition

Task Planning

AUDIENCE

Whole Team

We have a plan for this week’s work.

If you follow the practices described in Chapter 8, you’ll end up with a visual plan with multiple levels of detail: valuable increments that could possibly be done in the long-term, small valuable increments that are likely to be done in the medium-term, and specific stories that will be done in the near-term.

That plan turns into action through task planning: breaking down stories into tasks and tracking the team’s progress. Because Agile teams are self-organizing (see “SELF-ORGANIZING TEAMS”), task creation, assignment, and tracking is done entirely by the team, not by managers.

There are three parts to task planning: cadence, creating tasks, and visual tracking.

Cadence

Cadence is the frequency of your task planning. There are two common approaches in the Agile community: iterations (also called Sprints²) and continuous flow (also called Kanban).

Iterations are fixed-length timeboxes lasting a week or two. At the beginning of every iteration, you choose a set of stories to complete, and by the end, you expect them all to be done. Continuous flow, in contrast, is an unending stream of stories. You choose a new story whenever the previous one is finished.

Teams new to Agile should use iterations. Not because they’re easier—they’re actually harder—but because the strict iteration cadence provides important feedback about how the team needs to improve. More importantly, when used correctly, your iteration ...