Convincing my team that we need to split tasks by feature, not by work type?

Question

I'm in an agile team, with some developers, a designer and a ux guy. Sometimes we split some user stories into tasks when we think they are too big.When doing this, I've always read that we should split user stories into small features (so we can have a potentially shippable product after each task). However most of my team members insist in splitting tasks into work type (e.g. a task for wireframes for this user story, then another for design, and another for implementation). I understand that is a bad way, since we're not getting potentially shippable products, but I can't seem to make it clear for them that we need to change this. How could I do this?

Answer 1

I am not sure what your role is within this Agile team but there are some conceptual misunderstanding about Agile to begin with.

1. Epics are broken into features and features are broken into user stories. That is the foundation behind DEEP property for a product lack refinement. The Minimally Marketable Feature (MMF) that is associated with a potentially shippable increment is associated with a user story and not tasks.
2. In the Iteration/Sprint planning, there are two parts.
3. In the first part, the product owner describes what the user story is. Depending upon the risk and ambiguity involved to commit, the user stories are split. Then, the prioritized stories based on the iteration goal is pointed (in story points).
4. In the second part, the team that committed the user story identifies the tasks required to complete the story.
5. If the team prefers to split user stories into granular tasks, then, the team should. Neither the product owner nor the scrum master (or agile coach) should micromanage this aspect and if they do they are not supporting 'self-organization'.

So, there seems to be conceptual misunderstanding about how you would like to approach agile. Foster commitment in the team rather than a specific way of how you would like the team to operate.

May I recommend that you look at my webinar on agile anti-patterns to avoid? https://www.sriramrajagopalan.com/InflectraWebinar-AgileAntiPatterns.html

Thanks

Sriram