Improving task breakdown comprehensiveness in agile projects with an Interaction Room

Context: The planning, estimation and controlling mechanisms of agile process models rely significantly on a fixed set of tasks being established for each sprint. These tasks are created as refinements of product backlog items at the beginning of each sprint. However, a project team's understanding of the backlog items' business implications and dependencies may often not be deep enough to identify all necessary tasks this early, so in addition to the tasks defined in the beginning of the sprint, more necessary tasks might be discovered as the sprint progresses, making any attempt at progress estimation or risk management difficult. Objective: We strive to enable software teams to achieve a deeper understanding of product backlog items, which should help them to identify a sprint's tasks more reliably and comprehensively, and avoid discovering the need for extra tasks during sprint execution. Method: We introduced a project team in a medium-sized software development company to the Interaction Room method, which encourages interdisciplinary communication about key system design aspects among all stakeholders. We observed the team's conduct in the sprint planning meetings, and tracked early- vs. late-identified tasks across several sprints. Results: Before the introduction of our method, the team used to discover on average 26% of a sprint's tasks not at the beginning of the sprint, but later during the course of the sprint. Using the Interaction Room in two separate projects, this ratio dropped to an average of 5% late-discovered tasks. Conclusion: Our observations from these projects suggest that increased communication among all stakeholders of a project leads to a more reliable identification of the tasks to be performed in a sprint, and that an Interaction Room can provide appropriate guidance to conduct this team communication in a focused and pragmatic way. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.