Tasks are fine-grained units of work that a developer can tackle within a limited amount of time, often within a work day. The duration can vary, effectively making it possible for Scrum Teams to influence the granularity of the tasks they want to have on the Task Board.

When breaking a requirement down into tasks, the developers think about the individual steps that are necessary to implement the requirement. This helps in effort estimation and allows the Scrum Team to split work among themselves more easily. A responsible developer can be assigned for each of the tasks.

Ideally, the different tasks are vertical "slices" of the requirement. That means that tasks are not divided horizontally (one task for the GUI, one for the business logic, and one for the backend) but that each task contains elements of all horizontal layers. This ensures that each task's completion delivers at least some value to the customer. A technique to achieve this aim is Alistair Cockburn's Elephant Carpaccio.