How to break Feature into Tasks: no leftovers!

Once you decide how to break a feature into tasks, it’s crucial to make sure you don’t leave any leftovers as part of the breakdown. Feature breakdown must include each and every task to make it a complete unit you can deploy as part of a version. Completeness means that not only a Feature is deployable and it can be monitored, it’s also with great external quality (no major bugs left behind) and great internal quality (design-review, QA test-cases review, code-review, UI review).

You want to price a Feature by the gross organization time; this is the only way to understand how much a Feature really costs. Knowing that, you can correctly price future roadmap without needing “Bugs Elimination Sprint” or “Big Refactoring Sprint” to introduce quality after things were delivered to your customers.

No leftovers:

1. Design review – may it be over emails or formal meeting, the design should be solid and well thought

2. QA test-cases review – making sure QA will test the right things or add more test cases for relevant edge-cases.

3. Testing time – writing tests (unit + integration) should be priced as part of the Feature, not after, not next sprint.

4. Code review – for knowledge sharing and internal quality validation.

5. UI review – making sure the UI look & feel just like Product team wanted it to be.

6. Bug fixing + validation buffer – fixing major bugs should be priced as well! if you’re not sure how much time to spend, start with 5-10% of the total estimated effort, and learn from your experience (by Feature size, complexity etc)

You can add more to this list, if the team/organization needs it. The idea is to make sure that once a Feature is complete, you’re feeling great about it and got confidence it won’t be fired back to the kitchen, to cook from scratch. You should have the same confidence about changing an existing feature; it should be easy, voodoo-less and highly testable to do so, with low chances of breaking other flows in the system.