Re: Practice: Weekly Cycle

Ron,

All of your arguments against tracking tasks can be mitigated by good coaching, 
keeping the team focused on delivering value to the customer. A team that gets 
focused on the micro-scale is what I was getting at with my comment about 
pride. A team proud of delivering will take the time to focus on delivery as 
the customer sees it. A team afraid of getting blamed will focus on plausible 
deniability--I got my tasks done, you can't blame me if the story doesn't work. 
The behavior you describe sounds like symptoms of deeper problems. Eliminating 
tasks won't eliminate those problems.

In my practice the task list isn't carved in stone. There is a picture of a 
task list in Planning XP that shows tasks elininated, cut in half, and added in 
the course of an iteration. The tasks give you individual accountability and 
the sense of being a team keeps you focused on the big picture. Both are 
necessary.

Kent Beck
Three Rivers Institute

-----Original Message-----
From: Ron Jeffries <ronjeffries-iH4XQsbo15BDlFalPvvQyA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Nov 24, 2004 3:35 AM
To: xpbookdiscussiongroup-hHKSG33TihhbjbujkaE4pw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [xpe2e] Practice: Weekly Cycle

I continue to find task focus to be a problem. At least three problems, in
fact:

  1. Task focus comes at the expense of story focus. Tasks get done but
  somehow the story does not.

  2. Task estimates too commonly become proof that we can't really do the
  story in a week. The reason is that the task becomes overblown in some
  way that isn't needed for current stories, and still falls short in some
  way that another task or the whole story needs.

  3. The initial task breakdown is a design without feedback. Focusing on
  the tasks thereafter commonly misses the more creative solution to the
  story.

I strongly favor brainstorming tasks and then spiking through stories with
the tasks in mind but without task focus. Then elaborate the code, again
with tasks in mind, until the story is complete. The tasks brainstormed may
not be complete -- they may not even be necessary.



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