Ask HN: How is engineering work being organized in your organization?
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.