How to think through important tasks when planning

It's hard to think of all the tasks you need to account for even in a single user story without some experience and a framework.  Below is a matrix to help you think of the types of detailed tasks that be required to complete each sprint and also ensure you capture these in your initial project plan.  Consider the streams of sprint responsibilities below in Blue.  You'll notice that the PDM has three streams of activities align with the three silos of activities on the PDM.  

  • Development - This stream accounts for all the steps to gather remaining requirements need to complete design each functional requirement, build each requirement, demo, get approval, and deploy each requirement into the staging or production environment.
  • Change Management - This stream relates to the design and creation of the artifacts and process to ensure the client can manage the change.  This typically means a training outline, training decks, user guides or reference materials that will be around after the project, and a developer guide.
  • Quality Assurance - This is the stream that focuses on making sure all requirements are validated to be work as the design states or the user intended.  Any issues found are logged and either fixed and retested OR if the bug is low enough in severity, it's logged to be fixed after go-live.

Once you think about the 3 streams (rows below) you can break this up into the iterative sub-categories mentioned in the SDLC Green.  As you go through each A, D, C, R, and D silos for a certain stream, this will help you think of what types of tasks will I need to consider in my planning.  Assume that each role or stream has something to be doing during ADCRD.

We've provided some examples below.

Analysis

 Design Construction Review Deploy
Development for Functional Reqs

e.g. Gather table requirements

e.g. Design table in ERD

e.g. Build the table

e.g. Developer unit testing

e.g. Fix bugs logged

e.g. Demo Sprint

e.g. Get sign-off of user story 

e.g. Migrate Table from Test to Prod

e.g. Deploy forms

Change Management

e.g. Determine user needs and skills

e.g. Design training outline

e.g. Draft outline of Developer Guide

e.g. Build User Guides and Training Deck 

e.g. Create Developer Guide

e.g. Get User feedback/approval on Training & Guides

e.g. Conduct training of users on sprint

e.g. Conduct developer training on sprint

e.g. Email all users that new functionality is live (if applicable)

Quality Assurance

e.g. Inventory all tests needed based on requirements

e.g. Design test scripts and test data

e.g. Execute tests and log bugs

e.g. Retest fixes

e.g. User Acceptance Testing

e.g. Log any bugs not fixed due to low priority