Being able to do multiple concurrent tasks for a story is the holy grail of agile development. It may not be a myth, but the amount and benefit of it has definitely been over sold. One of the consistent things that I hear that didn’t work well in sprints is that people complain that “this task forced me to rework that task, and it cost time”. This seems to happen most commonly by development changing test plans. However, I’ve heard it from people in pretty much each role at one time or another. Occasionally, I’ve been the one saying it too.
It’s too easy to just say the usual platitudes, “mythical man month”, “can’t produce a baby in one month…”. Blah, blah, blah who really cares? That’s been discussed a lot and no real answers have ever come up. The more interesting question is why do we keep buying into the idea that tasks are completely independent and can be done in parallel? For that matter, why do we think the same thing about stories also? If we start to understand why we think the tasks are independent of each other, perhaps that can provide clues about why this occasionally breaks down.
