Ideas for tasks when splitting or planning your User Stories

After years of working in a command and control culture moving to an agile methodology feels liberating for many team members. Unfortunately it can also feel over whelming. The first time a team needs to plan their iteration for themselves the can struggle to think of appropriate (and importantly small) tasks to split their User Story into. What follows is a list of ideas that I use with new teams to open their eyes to some of the options they have available to them.

Additionally of the following information is available on this one page PDF cheat sheet.

Acceptance

• Clarify Product Owner expectations
• Product Owner early feedback
• Product Owner review 
• Confirm all Acceptance criteria

Shared Understanding

• Scenario workshop (Three amigos)
• Design session
• Test creation session
• Meet with customer representative

Development

• Design review 
• Refactoring of existing code
• Interfaces created
• Code / Implementation
• Code reviewed
• Unit tests
• Unit tests reviewed 
• Defects resolved 
• Defects retested 
• Code merged 

Quality Assurance

• Functional test plan created 
• Functional test plan reviewed 
• Functional test plan executed 
• Automate functional tests 
• Identify tests for automation
• Exploratory testing
• Regression Test Suite passes 
• Continuous Integration passes
• Deployment Tested
• Performance tested

Documentation

• Deployment instructions
• Internal Processes / Guides
• External Processes / Guides
• User story – notes, history, plan
• High Level design
• Design decisions
• User Manual
• Help
• ‘How to’ Guides 

Tracking

• User Story updated in tracking tool 

Demonstration

• Script/Run-sheet updated 
• Data prepared 
• Demo automated
• Deployed to demo environment 
• Practice run