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"When you have to pick fine grained tasks, you are forcing yourself to actually figure out what steps you are going to have to take."

That process isn't free. For many features, it's the largest share of the work.

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It's also the most valuable part of the entire article, and is true whether you're using waterfall, scrum, Extreme Programming, Kanban, or whatever. It's also the only thing that reliably works - the better you are at breaking down your work the better your estimates will be. As you said though, breaking down the work is oftentimes the largest part of the work because it requires _starting_ the work in the first place.

It's the opposite of free, it's valuable.

Even for features that stay on the cutting-room floor. Especially for features that stay on the cutting-room floor.

I find that 80% of the time the assumptions i made doing detailed planning are invalidated when doing the actual work.

Usually whole subtasks need to be junked and others created.

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