Do this and you will be more productive with your delivery

As a team, to achieve sprint goals, the primary focus should be to keep the stories moving forward in the board. However, before moving a story to the next phase, there are tasks to be completed in each phase.

For an instance, before moving a story to In Progress, you need to make sure the requirements are well defined and clear to proceed. Here in this article, let’s look at in detail what tasks we need to concentrate and track to deliver a user story with success.

Keep in mind there are numerous ways followed in the industry and what we will be discussing here is one we have been following over the years in my organisation to deliver stories successfully.

When the story has been created and requirements are specified, grooming will be done, and story points are allocated and added to the active sprint during the planning.

Now it’s in the hands of the technical team to deliver and here comes the challenge for everyone to keep track of what has been done under each story and what’s left to be done.

How do we track the progress of the story?

The best way is to identify the generic sub tasks needed to be employed in a user story to get it done. These generic tasks can be defined and documented as a template. When you are starting a story, by default the team can create these sub-tasks under each story so that the track will be not lost.

If your issue tracker has the capability to create rules to auto-populate sub-tasks for stories, you can automate this process by creating the generic sub-tasks under the story when the story is ready.

What are the main sub-tasks needed in the story

Sub tasks may vary depending on the process and the approach you follow in delivering. Below is a list of tasks we have been using.

• Creating Development Specs –to keep track of the progress of the technical design. For an example changes in the database.
• Implementation — this is where the implementation of technical design happens.
• Creating Test Specs –to track the test design and high-level test activities done.