Quickly break down user stories, right from the task board. Work has started on Sprint 2 of a CRM application Sarah is working on, and she was just assigned a new user story to help customer service specialists know who is calling before they answer the phone. Using relationship groupings, Sarah can create tasks for the story and estimate effort required to complete each task.
For this story, Sarah has identified four tasks that need to be completed before the story can be considered done. First, she'll need to do some research in the phone systems and their APIs. She expects that to take eight hours, and can provide a quick estimate right on the card. The next step is to take the incoming caller's phone number and match it with known contacts in CRM. This should be pretty straightforward. Sarah provides an estimate of two hours for this task. Once she has the caller's name and number, she'll have to write some code to show that information to the support specialist. She estimates this will take another two hours.
Lastly, she'll need to build a configuration screen where each support specialist can set up integration between the application and their phone. This will require some wireframes and possible help from the UX team, so she's going to estimate eight hours for this task. Now that she's broken down the story into tasks, and provided estimates, that information will feed into the Sprint burndown chart and other metrics that the team uses to monitor progress.