Story Splitting – Part 1

I am sure you’ve already read about story splitting on at least a dozen blogs. Still, I think I have something new to say.

Let’s start from the very beginning.  Firstly, test your story on the INVEST model 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INVEST_%28mnemonic%29) criterion.  If your sprint or Kanban flow is in motion, ensure that the story size is approximately 1/10 to 1/6 of average velocity of your team. These numbers are not hard-set but more of a guideline. Hurray!! you have the right sized story.

In case the story doesn't pass the INVEST model test or is bigger than the 1/10th to 1/6th of average velocity, consider splitting the story. 

In my story split workshops, I consider four big approaches to splitting a story. Here we'll talk about approach 1, the Grammar Approach.

1. ·         Grammar approach
2. ·         Business approach
3. ·         Technology approach
4. ·         Miscellaneous

In the Grammar approach, focus is on the grammatical construct of the story. There are 
two possible paths here:

   Path 1: In all the three parts of the story, look for conjunctions (e.g. and, or, but, when,  
               commas, etc.). Conjunctions are potential join points for different ideas. You may 
               like to split the story.

   Path 2: You may also search for generic words (especially in Part 2 and 3) in the story 
                which can be replaced by specific words. For example,
 

As a customer,

I want to load the welcome page within a few seconds.

So that I won’t need to wait a long time for the welcome page

In this story, you might have spotted “a few seconds” and “wait a long time” as generic words. You may now split this story in two parts:
 

As a customer,

I want to load the welcome page within 2 seconds (if simultaneous users are less than 1000),

So that I won’t need to wait long for the welcome page.

As a customer,

I want to load the welcome page within 2 seconds (if simultaneous users are more than 1000

 but less than 5000),

So that I won’t need to wait long for the welcome page.

Hope this is helpful. Looking forward to your comments and stay tuned for parts 2.