What is the best practice for having Product Manager Story and Related dev Tasks?

[Lior Pesoa]

Hi :)

I would like to get some ideas on best practices regarding the following issue:

Our product manager is creating a Story, the Dev team creating Tasks for this story and linking them to the PM Story.

During the Sprint, the Dev team move their tasks from 'ToDo' to 'In Progress' -> 'Ready for QA'  -> 'Ready for prod' - > Done

But, the PM Story doesn't move. Do you have any suggestion on best practice here?

Maybe we should work differently? Our current method also creates duplicates and can cause the Story not to move.

We don't want to create sub-tasks for the Story, because it doesn't sum up when you estimate, therefore we create separate tasks.

Thank you!

[Ste]

Hi @Lior Pesoa

This is how our teams do this:

• Product Manager and Developers write the story / acceptance criteria
• Developers choose if they need to break this into development sub-tasks

Our developers choose based on how their team works - and it often comes down to board preference (i.e stories as swimlanes vs stories as cards).

In regards to estimation - it depends on what you're using. There is best practice from a Scrum perspective - but there is no right-or-wrong - it depends on your team.

If hours, I'm pretty sure you can roll-up your original estimates to story level and visualise how much time it will take to complete all sub-tasks of a story.

If you're using story points - general practice would suggest teams (Product Managers & Devs) should write the story together and size it. It's not a specific measure of time but of complexity - and allows for velocity to be tracked so that the Product Manager to look at release planning.

If our teams do need to estimate sub-tasks - they use hours to visualise how much effort has gone into the work - sometimes taken into consideration when sizing a similar piece of work if it took longer / more work than anticipated. But this is mainly a team thing - any reporting for the wider audience is done at story level.

However, there's arguments for using sub-tasks in different manners, depending on your team. I found a great answer on this from @Kyle Gearhart in this question (scroll to the bottom).

Ste