Story tasks

In each iteration, I want to plan to finish about about 3 to 6 user stories. Each user story might include a dozen tasks, each task taking 2-8 hours.

The non-technical people get overwhelmed when looking at the list of tasks. The user stories are clusters of related tasks.

We have implemented tasks and soon you will be able to enable them in your projects. Tasks are not worth any points.

If you want to estimate your tasks, one options would be to use chores and turn on 'estimate bugs and chores' in the experimental section of your project settings.

Hi Mike, can you clarify your suggestion? I'm coming from XPlanner where each story had a rough estimate, then team breaks the story down into tasks, each with its own estimate. Then the story estimate is sum of its tasks. Since PT can't estimate tasks, how would 'estimating bugs and chores' help? Wouldn't this just create a bunch of separate PT stories (which are actually tasks), no longer associated (contained within) the original story?

Or maybe my process mindset is wrong from using XPlanner too long. What is the PT-way to provide rough story estimates and then more accurate estimates after task breakdown? I suppose we could just add tasks to the story, then re-estimate the story's points based on new detailed task breakdown. How are other teams doing this?

Thanks in advance.

Tracker is designed to encourage breaking things down into fine-grained stories. Tasks are just reminders and should not need to be estimated. In our experience that is just too big an investment of time that should be spent on implementation.

Point estimates are relative and rather vague anyway. You shouldn't need to re-estimate a story after adding tasks. If you do, you could consider making some of the tasks into stories.

Hi,
I completely agree with Guy.
What we do is break down features into tasks of a maximum length of 8 hours when we are doing our sprint planning. Typically a user story for us is about 40 hours of work, and consists of 5-10 tasks. We hare a product backlog with about 300 items of this size.

It would be a huge addition to Pivotaltracker if you where able to make task you could assign to a story and estimate it and assign the task to a teammember. Right now we can only use pivotal tracker for our smaller projects because of this.

I will be happy to sent you a sprint backlog example in excel if you are interested.

Also having this task tool could potentially be used for linking bugs to specific features - which would be a really awesome thing :-)

All the best,

/asbjoern

My sprint backlog is an absolute disaster because there is no way to clearly differentiate between tasks, bugs, chores, and user stories (or epics for that matter). The most difficult part of this application is the product owner planning/management part of it. POs just need a simple way to organize, prioritize, and accomplish user stories. Seeing the tasks is helpful but not while planning, one should only see the estimated effort and the name of the story.

Look at bananascrum, they did a nice job on their one page planning screen.