Splitting User Stories

I’ve written about User Stories before and made available a handout that includes a page on splitting stories that, in addition to listing some splitting heuristics, includes several links to several lists of techniques for splitting stories.

What it doesn’t include is an even simpler way to split stories–the simplest way I’ve found yet.When doing Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD), we create examples that illustrate the functionality we want the software to have.  Each of these examples is, potentially, a separate story.  You can split a story by dividing these examples into two or more groups.  It’s that simple.

[Note added May 2, 2023:  Today, I would tend to use Example Mapping to develop the examples. Often further splits become apparent as the Three Amigos discuss the desired behavior.]

By the way, here are some other guides on splitting stories:

and the InfoQ article that triggered this post:

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