At the beginning of each sprint our team will pull in a handful of user stories and then, one by one, write slightly more detailed tasks for them as well as assign specific hours to each task. Having individual tasks helps us establish our sprint burn-down by having a specific total number of hours up front, as well as make it more feasible to keep track of who's working on what and what all has been completed.However, I recently read that some mature Agile teams have eliminated the use of writing tasks altogether and head right into their sprints armed only with their user stories as the modularized sources of work for the sprint.I'm having a hard time seeing how eliminating task planning could still provide an Agile team with small enough units of work so as to keep the sprint organized and transparent. Has anyone here tried or use this approach and if so how do you keep track of exactly who is working on what?
Task Planning on an Agile Team
agile;scrum;planning;task
Our team actually does it both ways, depending on the user story.  Well, we actually still do one big task called Fix it or something, so the burndown chart will still work on our tool.The difference for us is how easy it is to predict the tasks in advance.  For example, we do embedded software, and whenever we have a brand new board to get booting it's very difficult to predict the individual parts, but by experience we know how long it usually takes for everything together.  One time the clocks might be perfect but some power rails are unstable, the next time it might be the other way around.Also, some teams break their user stories down into smaller parts than others.  Our team averages around 12 per sprint.  Other teams at my company average 3 or 4 per sprint.  The smaller your stories, the less you need tasks.It boils down to choosing what works best for the style of your individual team.  If you can't imagine working without tasks, that shouldn't make you feel inferior.  On the other hand, if you feel like tasks are a hindrance, you should feel free to discard them.