Scrum Taskboard - can the tasks change?

Question

Hi,

The company I work for is currently looking to move from traditional waterfall into Scrum for development. We are in the process of slowly adopting what practices we can without fully making the move (we still have much to learn before we can fully move on over!).

One of the things we want to implement now, before making the full switch, is the taskboard. We all feel it's a great tool that can help with development, and help keep those business users off our backs with the "what you doing?" and "how's it going?" questions and meetings.

So with all that said, one thing I've been wondering is can the tasks on the taskboard change? I know you don't want to be changing Stories, but what about tasks within a story? What if a new task came up, or an old task is no longer valid? Can they be added and/or removed mid-sprint (though we're not really using sprints, more like short development cycles).

Thanks!

Answer 1

The team commit on user stories, not tasks

It's not a problem to have some tasks changing as you are facing problems or have better implementation ideas.

In fact, it's very rare to finish a sprint with every task 100% "predicted" accurate in the sprint planning meeting.

Answer 2

I know you don't want to be changing Stories, but what about tasks within a story? What if a new task came up, or an old task is no longer valid? Can they be added and/or removed mid-sprint (...).

Yes, they can. During an iteration, a team typically gathers knowledge and gets a better understanding of what has to be done, or not. As a consequence, a team may discover that a task isn't really relevant, that a given Backlog Item requires more work than expected, that an initial estimation is wrong. In such cases, you definitely want to update your Sprint Backlog and the Burndown Chart to stick to the reality and keep what has to be done visible: you really want to know if the iteration is still on track, if you can take one more items, etc.

So, yes, don't hesitate to update, remove, add tasks as soon as you discover it has to be done. And the earlier, the better.

In our team, we use a task board inspired by Scrum and XP from the Trenches from Henrik Kniberg and we have a special location for "unplanned items" as illustrated below:

We like this approach because it makes easy to detect if unplanned items are killing an iteration. And we also "review" such tasks during the retrospective to see how we can improve our planning meeting, our estimations, the way we break down items, etc.

Answer 3

I already like Pascal and Andy's answers so not to repeat.

A usefull alternative is to start a Kanban Board. Henrik Kniberg also has a good 'book' about it, available here: http://blog.crisp.se/henrikkniberg/2009/04/03/1238795520000.html

It allows you to organise your work and be isert some Agile thinking into the company. As Andy said, Scrum is an All-in, if not you will find that 'It doesn't work'.