0. Overview of Task Categories

Every day developers, quality assurance testers, designers, team leads, and others need to decide what is most valuable to work on that day. Teams often attempt to prioritize what is to be done over short time frames such as every two weeks or each month. But many teams fall into some bad habits of working on only some specific types of tasks instead of tasks that could be more valuable. One example of this failure is known as the ‘feature mill’. When a team is a ‘feature mill’, they are focusing on delivering as many features as quickly as possible, often without knowing if they are also the most valuable features to deliver, and worse, often developing features when they could derive more benefit from another action such as automating builds.