User Stories Vs. Tasks

User stories are one of the primary development artifacts for Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) project teams. A user story is a very high-level definition of a requirement, containing just enough information so that the developers can produce a reasonable estimate of the effort to implement it.

A Task is a simple description of how to do some bit of work towards completing an item in the Work Item List. However, there are some important things to remember when using Tasks.

Normally, an item from the Work Item List is broken down into multiple Tasks. These Tasks are all the things that need to be done or built to get the item into a deliverable state.

In general, the process of creating a bundle of Tasks for a given Work Item is a design or analysis process. It is a problem-solving process. The Tasks themselves represent the solution: the building blocks of the structure of the Work Item. Tasks do not normally represent the problem solving or analysis process.

Writing stories should be a separate activity from the tasking of the stories themselves. The story should be about what specifically you want your product to do and clearly explain the value of this feature. Together with the scrum team you should clearly define the acceptance criteria of the story. Only after these are defined should the story be tasked out by the contributors who will be doing the work. They get to decide how to best get it done.

The process of breaking down a user story is important because it helps me think about how I'm going to build the functionality. Many people disaggregate a user story into tasks and then estimate them (usually in ideal time) because they're smaller units of work and can be estimated with less inaccuracy. Then they total the task estimates to obtain a better indication of how long it will take to complete the user story. Tracking each task's remaining time feels like micro-management, so I don't it anymore. I'm only interested in tracking the number of running tested features. I want to know how many user stories are passing all their FIT tests.

~SA