I often get asked by Agile teams what should go on a Kanban board during sprint planning. The short answer is: It depends on what works well for you as long as you are maintaining the spirit of the methodology by keeping everything visible on the board and “Just-in-time”.

Some companies focus on recruiting highly qualified full stack developers that can work on different areas such as database design, business logic, front end, testing, integration.. etc. In this case, I believe the best option is to use only user stories on the Sprint board. Each developer will be able to handle a full user story and move it across the Kanban board as a one coherent unit which reduces the overhead of handoffs and coordination with other developers. Also it makes easier for the product owner to verify a full user story rather than trying to combine multiple tasks together to create a testable narrative.

Other companies prefer to recruit specialized folks like a business logic developer, DevOps, front end.. etc, which requires the use of tasks or a combination of tasks and user stories to split the job between developers and to keep everything visible on the board.

Another consideration is that you may need more granularity for burn down to see how you are doing over the course of the sprint. Some teams find this important particularly if you are working on longer cycles and that’s why probably tasks function better for you.