Transforming Our Agile Journey: A Personal Guide to Effective User Story Splitting

In our relentless pursuit of agility and excellence, we’ve identified a crucial area of improvement — the art of user story splitting. It’s become clear that mastering this skill is paramount for seamless collaboration between our product and technical teams. Today, I’m excited to share our journey, strategies, and the lessons we’ve learned along the way. Together, we are on a mission to enhance our agile practices and ensure that every user story we create is a stepping stone toward success. Image Prompt: Capture the essence of a team in a collaborative setting, possibly around a table with agile boards or digital tools visible. Show diverse team members actively engaged in discussion, highlighting the sense of unity and determination to improve their agile practices.

Embracing Small, Valuable Increments

We’ve learned that the key to agility lies in breaking down our grand ideas into small, manageable pieces. It’s not just about making tasks smaller; it’s about ensuring each piece delivers distinct value. For instance, instead of having a broad user story like “As a user, I want a checkout system to purchase items,” we break it down into smaller stories such as “As a user, I want to add items to my cart” and “As a user, I want to input my shipping details.” This approach empowers our team to swiftly navigate through tasks, ensuring a constant stream of progress and feedback. Image Prompt: Illustrate the concept of breaking down larger tasks into smaller, more manageable pieces. This could be visualized through a puzzle, a flowchart, or a series of boxes decreasing in size, symbolizing the journey from a large task to smaller, more focused tasks.

The INVEST Criteria: Our Guiding Principles

To ensure each user story stands up to scrutiny, we’ve embraced the INVEST criteria:

• Independent: Each story stands alone, ensuring flexibility in our backlog.
• Negotiable: We keep an open dialogue, ensuring the best ideas shine.
• Valuable: Every story directly contributes to our product’s value.
• Estimable: Clarity is key; we ensure each story is easily estimable.
• Small: We aim for quick completions, keeping momentum high.
• Testable: Every story must be verifiable, ensuring quality in every step. By adhering to these principles, we ensure that our user stories are not just tasks, but valuable assets driving our project forward. Image Prompt: Create a visual representation of the INVEST acronym, with each letter accompanied by a brief keyword or icon that represents its meaning (Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable). Ensure the image conveys clarity and structure, reflecting the guiding principles of our user story practice.

Strategies for Effective Story Splitting

We’ve explored various strategies to master story splitting:

• By Capabilities: Identifying distinct functionalities and treating them as individual stories.
• By User Roles: Recognizing the unique needs of different user roles.
• By User Personas: Catering to the varied interactions of different user personas.
• By Target Device: Ensuring a tailored experience across all devices. For example, when developing a new feature for our application, we consider how different user roles, such as admin and regular user, will interact with it, creating separate stories for each scenario. Image Prompt: Showcase various strategies for story splitting with distinct sections or icons representing each method (By Capabilities, By User Roles, By User Personas, By Target Device). Aim for a clean, organized layout that clearly differentiates between each strategy.

User-Centric Stories: The Heart of Our Approach

At the core of our approach is a commitment to user-centric stories. We’ve adopted the ‘user voice’ format, ensuring our stories resonate with the real needs and motivations of our users. This not only guides our development team but also ensures we’re building a product that truly meets our users’ needs. For instance, “As a new user, I want to easily sign up for an account so that I can start using the application immediately.” Image Prompt: Focus on the user’s perspective, possibly through an image of a user interacting with the product, overlaid with elements of a user story in the ‘user voice’ format. Highlight the connection between the user’s needs and the stories we create.

Full User Story Example and Techniques for Splitting

Let’s consider a feature for an e-commerce platform:

Original User Story:

As a shopper, I want to be able to search for products, view details, and add them to my cart so that I can purchase my desired items.

This user story, while clear in its intention, is quite broad and encompasses several functionalities. To ensure faster delivery and more focused development work, we can split this into smaller user stories.

1. Breaking Down by Workflow Steps:

• As a shopper, I want to search for products using keywords so that I can find items I’m interested in.
• As a shopper, I want to view detailed product information when I select a product so that I can make informed decisions.
• As a shopper, I want to add products to my cart from the product details page so that I can prepare for checkout.

2. Breaking Down by Business Rules:

• As a shopper, I want to see an error message if my search yields no results so that I know to try different keywords.
• As a shopper, I want to be able to add multiple quantities of a product to my cart from the product details page.

3. Breaking Down by Acceptance Criteria:

• As a shopper, I want the search results to load quickly so that I am not kept waiting.
• As a shopper, I want to see customer reviews on the product details page so that I can gauge the product’s quality.

4. Breaking Down by Vague Items:

• As a shopper, I want to see thumbnail images of the products in the search results so that I can visually identify the items.
• As a shopper, I want to see the price and availability status on the product details page.

5. Breaking Down by Conjunctions:

By breaking down the original user story using these techniques, we have created smaller, more manageable stories that can be developed, tested, and delivered more quickly, ensuring a steady flow of value to our users.

Our journey in mastering user story splitting has been transformative. We’ve seen firsthand how small, valuable increments of functionality can lead to a more agile, responsive development process. By adhering to the INVEST criteria and adopting a user-centric approach, we’ve fostered a culture of continuous improvement and collaboration. Together, we’re not just building a product; we’re crafting an experience that truly resonates with our users. As we move forward, we carry the lessons learned and the strategies developed, ensuring that every user story we create is a step towards excellence. Image Prompt: Convey a sense of achievement and forward momentum. This could be an image of the team celebrating a successful sprint, or a visual metaphor like a journey’s path, showing the progress made and the direction we’re headed.

Originally published at http://onuruguroffical.com on November 6, 2023.