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:
- William Wake, “Twenty Ways to Split Stories“
- J.B. Rainsberger, “Splitting stories: an example“
- Lasse Koskela, “Ways to split user stories“
- James Grenning “Story Weight Reduction Toolkit“
and the InfoQ article that triggered this post:
- Dan Puckett, “How To Split User Stories“
A very nice blog.
Perhaps not as classic as the others but another pair of entries in the genre:
http://agilepainrelief.com/notesfromatooluser/2010/09/story-slicing-how-small-is-enough.html and
http://agilepainrelief.com/notesfromatooluser/2010/12/more-notes-on-story-splitting.html
Another good description of splitting user stories, Gerard Meszaros’ Storyotypes (http://storyotypespaper.gerardmeszaros.com/)
Now available in French: http://www.les-traducteurs-agiles.org/user%20stories/2015/05/17/fractionner-les-user-stories.html
I’ve updated some of the links. It’s amazing how web pages move over the course of 9 years.
Tim Ottinger offers some story splitting advice, also.
https://agileotter.blogspot.com/2022/03/splitting-stories-resource-list.html