We are an engineer team of 10 people working in a startup.Up to now, we organized our work in iterations of 2 weeks.Before each iteration starts:1. Product team will assign stories for the next iteration.
2. Engineering team leads will break down stories into technical tasks.
3. After technical tasks have been created, we use [planning poker]( to assign points to each development task.For the most part, this works fine. However, we have a few emerging problems:* Breaking down stories into technical tasks is taking a long-time. Team lead will spend about 16 hours.
* Once broken down, tasks do not necessarily align with what actually needs to be developed, i.e. as developers start working, they realize more optimal ways to break down tasks.
* As a startup, we have a lot of tasks that are added mid-iteration. This scope creep accounts anywhere from 10-30% of each iteration.As a result, engineers proposed that we abandon iterations and story points in general.* All stories would be organized in a single priority list.
* Development tasks would be created ad-hoc to match what is being developed.
* We would stop tracking engineer velocity using story points.My hesitation with this proposal is that without knowing team's velocity, we cannot plan when features will be completed.I am curious to know how engineering work is organized in your organization, if there are similarities to how we organize / consider organizing work, and pros / cons you have observed.