When it comes to splitting user stories, I always give the cake examples to the teams I work it. In Agile, the product you are building is like a cake. You tend to make it by layers: first the base, then the moose, then another layer, then the fruits layer, then the cream, and in the end the
decorations. You involve the users all along with the development of the users stories, as the best practices say. And when you finish making the cake is, and your users taste it, guess what? They don’t like it. Learning to master how to split the user stories in Agile will help you to make complete cake slides for your users to taste from the beginning. So you can deliver end-to-end experience to your clients. They must eat the
slice of cake. It might not have all the decorations, but they can get the full experience.
For this article, I’ll use an example of the CooLab application. It is an application that aims to connect Cooks with starving people who want to spend time with their families. Below you’ll find several actors that give life to my examples on how to split the user stories:
Here are a 10 techniques on how to split user stories to get inspired by:
Try applying the techniques above and let me know how it goes. I’m curious to learn about your experiences. You might also be interested in: Why do we split user stories?Why Split User Stories? The simplest answer is that they are too big to complete within a single Sprint. If that's the case, then you will have to find a logical way to split it into smaller pieces – some of which would then be right-sized to get to “done” inside of a Sprint.
What is a recommended story splitting technique for agile teams?What is a recommended Story-splitting technique for Agile Teams? During Iteration Review, the team decides to carry forward three Stories to the next Iteration. This is the second time during this PI that some of the team's Stories are carried over.
When should you break up a user story?You should see a break point at which stories get unwieldy or balloon unexpectedly. When stories cause sprint bloat, it's likely a symptom of unaccounted-for complexity. If those 13-point stories always end up dragging through multiple sprints, it's time to agree that your stories need to be sized at an 8 or below.
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