Agile story vs. Project Task

[JustinTa1]

I've looked through the documentation, but I haven't found an answer to this question. Are agile stories and project tasks the same thing just called a different name? In what ways are they different? I'm currently treating them the same within our projects and agile boards, but I'd like to know if this may be a mistake in the future. Justin Tafoya

[MirandaRa1]

I guess you could just treat them the same, at the end of the day they are tasks. The difference is how they are grouped and displayed. The main difference here is if you are using agile scrum - an iteration will mess with your timeline in a waterfall project. Miranda Rais

[ParkeBr]

It sounds like there might be some deeper implications here worth unpacking. That said, they appear to me to be roughly the same. Workfront is going to use issues, tasks and subtasks to organize work by default. Using Agile in Workfront seems to generally take the tasks and pull the uppermost one assigned to the team into the story column to define the swimlane. It's children become the tasks that or cards that move through the swimlane. I'm newer so I'd keep exploring but that might be a start. Parke Brown

[AnthonyIm]

Yes, they are the same thing or object type. That is why when you put something in the backlog, it asks you for the project to put the task in. The difference is the assignment of the task. If the task is assigned to an individual or a non-agile team, it just stays a task. If the task is assigned to an agile team, then it will appear in that teams backlog and be added to iterations. As mentioned by Miranda, this makes people think it is very easy to do mix methodology, but it is not. When a task is in an iteration, the planned completion date for all tasks is changed to the end of the iteration. This can mess things up with the other tasks in the project that might be doing waterfall. We STRONGLY and HIGHLY recommend that teams that do agile have their own "backlog" or "bucket" projects and work with those. We might do cross-project predecessors, but that is really to help inform the Can Start field than any date fields. Hope that makes sense. Anthony Imgrund FCB