Breaking down the project into small tasks [closed]

Question

Am wondering, when a new project arrives, say building a social networking website, how do I go about breaking the project into small tasks. There are usually 2-4 programmers per project and usually no testers as such. Should I be breaking the whole site into 4 hour tasks from the beginning itself. Should we be doing it in phases? What about testing, is it okay to have the programmers test the code?

Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

We use a fairly simple system.

• First we split the project into user stories or "verticals". For example "Update Customer".
• Make a list of all the verticals in the first column of your streadsheet.
• Then along the top you place the layers or activities. For example Data Layer, UI, Logging.
• For each of the elements in the matrix you cam allocate an estimate and decide who should develop it.
• Breaking it down into 4 hour elements is good, because then each developer can then say: "I am going to do these two tasks today" in the scrum.

We normally do this for each sprint for the activities that are to be completed within the sprint.

On testing programmers should test code by writing unit tests, but testers should perform the system test.