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Various articles on SCRUM methodology explicitly state that sizing should not fo

ID: 639081 • Letter: V

Question

Various articles on SCRUM methodology explicitly state that sizing should not focus on time, bur rather on the more abstract "complexity" or "effort needed" of the task.

How should a task be sized if the task is trivial to do, but requires a really long time to complete (say, half the sprint or the whole sprint)? Should it be sized 1, 2, 3, or more like 20-40-Inf?

As an example of such a task, I can give the following:

Convert the translated texts from the technical PDF documentation (10 000+ texts) in the correct translations format for Android and iOS.

Explanation / Answer

Take any trivial manual task and repeat it 10,000 times.

That will take effort - possibly a lot of effort.

Our profession is all about automation, so the obvious first approach should be "can I automate this?". If you can, you probably should.

However, sometimes you can't automate as much as you'd like - maybe there's no budget for it, maybe defining the rules for automation are too difficult, etc.

It might be quicker to just do the task manually than to automate it.

I see no problem with sizing the task to reflect the work put in - even if it's totally mindless work.