Being Agile: Eleven Breakthrough Techniques to Keep You from “Waterfalling Backward”

Small Task Sizes: 4 Hours, 8 Hours, 16 Hours

It’s time for some specific recommendations for putting these principles into action. First, when you and your team create tasks for user stories at the beginning of each iteration, limit your task sizes to 4 hours, 8 hours, or no more than 16 hours in size. And do not bother trying to get any “finer grained” than just those sizes. The goal of breaking work down into these small sizes is not to be exact with the sizes, nor to make you really good at estimating to the minute exactly how long you expect a task to take, but it is to ensure that the team can more easily function in a tightly integrated fashion. (Yes, we’re engineers and we love numbers and precision, but trying to use a micrometer to measure ...