Story Splitting

Supports Pillars:

Business Value, Product

Dependencies on Other Skills:

Story Writing, Story Estimation

Definition:

Splitting stories means taking a story and reducing it into some number of smaller stories that each have demonstrable business value. There is a school of thought that being able to identify the smallest increment that still has value to the customer is generally useful and that, therefore, we should always try to break stories down. Some also believe that this process can be used to get all stories to roughly the same (small) size. While it is always possible to break a story down into smaller, technical tasks, this is generally avoided to keep the focus on delivering increments of verifiable business value.

Resources:

William Wake, “Twenty Ways to Split Stories”

J.B. Rainsberger, “Splitting stories: an example”

James Grenning “Story Weight Reduction Toolkit”

Lasse Koskela Ways to split user stories

Richard Lawrence "Patterns for splitting user stories"

Steps to Mastery:

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Organizational Support of this Skill:

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