Scrum tasks for stories in CWM
Summarize
Summary of Scrum Tasks for Stories in CWM
Scrum tasks in Collaborative Work Management (CWM) enhance your agile workflow by breaking down user stories into manageable units of work. This granularity allows teams to estimate effort, distribute tasks, and monitor daily progress throughout a sprint. Scrum tasks are linked to their parent stories and cannot exist independently on the board.
Show less
Key Features
- Creation of Scrum Tasks: You can create scrum tasks manually or use Now Assist for automatic generation. Tasks can be added via the Scrum Tasks tab on the story form or from List and Sprint planning views.
- Visibility on Kanban Board: A scrum task indicator icon appears on the Kanban card of stories with tasks. Clicking the icon reveals task details to streamline workflow without leaving the board.
- Quick Filters: Utilize quick filters to focus on specific sprints or states, facilitating easier tracking during daily stand-ups and sprint execution.
Key Outcomes
Implementing scrum tasks allows for effective distribution of work among team members, ensuring clarity in task assignments and progress tracking. However, be mindful of the limitations, such as the inability to move or copy tasks outside their parent story and the restriction that scrum tasks inherit the sprint of their parent story.
For optimal use, ensure the scrum task work type is enabled in your ServiceNow instance and avoid duplication issues when importing stories through Connected work after an upgrade.
Extend your agile workflow in CWM by breaking user stories into scrum tasks, giving your team the granularity needed to estimate effort, distribute work, and track daily progress through a sprint.
In CWM, scrum tasks represent the individual units of work that make up a user story. While stories capture a feature or requirement from the user's perspective, scrum tasks break that story into steps that team members can pick up and complete independently during a sprint. Scrum tasks are always associated with a parent story and aren't a standalone work items on the board.
Creating scrum tasks
You can create scrum tasks manually or use Now Assist to generate them based on the story content.
After a story is saved, a Scrum Tasks tab is available on the story form. From this tab, you can add tasks by entering a title and any relevant details directly on the story. You can also create scrum tasks for stories inline from the List and Sprint planning views. For more information, see Add scrum tasks to a story in CWM.
Scrum tasks on the Kanban board
When a story has one or more scrum tasks, a scrum task indicator icon appears on the story's Kanban card. Selecting the icon opens a side panel that shows the scrum tasks for that story, so team members can view task details
without leaving the board.
Quick filters on the Kanban board let teams focus on specific sprints, states, or other columns. Multiple filters can be active at the same time, and a counter at the top of the board shows how many filters are currently applied. This makes it easier to track sprint-specific work during daily stand-ups and sprint execution.
Scrum task considerations and limitations
- Scrum tasks belong to a parent story and can’t exist independently as standalone work items on the board.
- When a story is moved from one sprint to another, the child scrum tasks also move to the new sprint.
- You can reorder scrum tasks only within its parent story.
- Scrum tasks can't be moved (drag and drop) or copied outside its parent story.
- Percent complete isn’t rolled up from scrum tasks to the parent story. Percent complete is tracked only for CWM tasks.
- When a story is imported through Connected work, its associated scrum tasks are brought in automatically along with it. Scrum tasks can’t be imported directly through Connected work.
- Scrum tasks can’t be assigned to a sprint independently. They inherit the sprint of their parent story. When you change the sprint for a story, all associated scrum tasks move to the new sprint automatically.
- Scrum tasks aren’t displayed in the Backlog section of the Sprint planning view. They’re shown only in the sprint section.
- Sprint information can't be edited on a scrum task record.
- Deleting a scrum task in CWM doesn’t delete the underlying record.
- You can't add scrum tasks if the scrum task work type is disabled in your ServiceNow instance.
- You can't add scrum tasks if you have just the Viewer access to the CWM Board.
- If scrum tasks were previously imported through Connected work before upgrading to v9.0.0, and stories are then imported through Connected work after the upgrade, duplicate scrum tasks may appear on the board. To resolve this, remove the existing configuration for scrum tasks in Connected work for your Board.