Creating Tasks For Product Owners – Part 2

Creating Tasks from User Stories

Once user stories have been broken down and clarified, the team can proceed with task creation. The developers have the expertise to know what are the best ways to build and test, so the Product Owner can trust the team in coming up with the tasks needed to complete the user stories. The Product Owner can help verify if the development team understood the requirements well and clarify anything if needed.

Because Agile estimation takes work and effort, it’s important for everyone in the team to discuss the tasks needed for user stories. The different roles in the team give different insights on how a feature can be developed – QA engineers can derive from their testing experience, designers can give their point of view, and developers can give technical inputs. Knowing what to do for each user story helps the team understand the effort it would take to develop it, thus allowing teams to give better estimates. This also helps the Product Owner prioritize user stories better within the Product Backlog and Sprint Backlog.

It’s up to the scrum team how they’re going to estimate the work they need to do. Some teams estimate using time formats, such as hours, days, or weeks. Another way to estimate is by using story points, which score the relative effort needed to finish the work with a Fibonacci-like sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.). Typically, teams would take a user story, have a short discussion about it, then individually and mentally form estimates.

When ready, all members would hold up the cards with their estimates written on them, so that they can all see each other’s estimates at the same time. If needed, they will re-discuss and re-estimate. This method is called planning poker, and it is a popular method for story point estimation, as it gives opportunities for teams to collaborate and talk about user stories and tasks.

The Product Owner is there to motivate and support the scrum team, by ensuring that the Product Vision, the Sprint Goal, and the feature requirements are understood by everyone. The Product Owner is helping them do what they need to do to deliver great software on time.

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Our Book Recommendations

We found these books great for finding out more information on Agile Scrum: