Let's say we're planning the next iteration and a big piece of work is to geo-code a location (lots of data entry). It will take several man-days. To me, this is NOT a user story because it's not something that designed, coded, tested, and deployed. So, is it just a task then?
If it is just a task, and we're showing our stakeholders the user stories we're going to undertake for the iteration, it may look small. I suppose it could look small anyway around the holidays when we factor in vacation time and show a reduced number of user story points.
I guess I'm asking how we show the volume of effort if some items are just big tasks. And to that point, to me a task is something that takes 8 hours or less so that a team member can complete it within a day for timesheet purposes (noting hours complete). If it spans several days, I would expect they'd need a separate task to show the effort on that day?
Thanks for any thoughts.