Facilitating task breakdown in sprint planning meeting 2 with an interaction room: An experience report

In a large industry project that followed an agile approach based on the Scrum method, we found that the team often struggled with breaking coarse product backlog items down into the detailed tasks that had to be completed in a sprint. The team's understanding of the backlog items' business and technical implications and dependencies seemed not deep enough to identify all necessary tasks, so in addition to the tasks defined in the sprint planning meeting prescribed by Scrum, an average of 26% of additional tasks was identified later over the course of each sprint, making any attempt at progress estimation or risk management very difficult. To counter this effect and support the team's understanding of backlog items right from the beginning of each sprint, we introduced a pragmatic method to analyze backlog items more comprehensively and thus support a more complete and reliable task breakdown. We consequently found that the effectiveness and precision of task breakdowns has improved significantly in the project.