I worked with a team once that had gotten into the habit of creating sub-tasks for every little thing they could think of. This list included such obvious items as “write the code” and “test the code” and a typical story would have about twenty of these sub-tasks attached.
These sub-tasks would then be visible on the board and people would be assigned to them and they’d talk about them in standup. Often the sub-tasks would be just be closed immediately because they weren’t applicable to the story.
Every bit of the time and effort involved in working with these sub-tasks was waste.
I do see value in creating sub-tasks for things you might forget to do but it seems unlikely that anyone would forget to “write the code”.
When I asked the team why they created so many of these sub-tasks every time, nobody knew. This was just the way they’d always done it so they continued mindlessly doing it again.
The whole reason that we hold a retrospective is to unpack things like this. This was a clear practice that was taking time from the team and was providing no value, yet it had never come up in any of the discussions. Instead the team would talk about superficial things that really made no difference and if they came up with retrospective actions at all, they were things that didn’t actually change anything.
So I brought these sub-tasks up in a retro and the team decided to eliminate them. A few weeks later, we stopped to reflect again and the team agreed that getting rid of those sub-tasks had been an overwhelming win.
If your retros are not coming up with actionable proposals to make the team better then you’re doing it wrong. Consider how you’re currently working and improve it.