It’s very important to store the stories in a way that they can very easily be merged and split. It’s common for teams to record too much information in their stories. To the point that it becomes very tedious and overly complicated to attempt to merge or split a story. And so it’s rarely suggested by the team, even though it’s the right thing to do.
Merging is pretty straightforward to do. And splitting stories is more of a craft, because each story still needs to aim towards following INVEST. (Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimatable, Small, and Testable.)
For example we can split a story for Login into:
- Single Login Attempt,
- Multiple Login Attempts,
- Login with No Password Given,
- Forgot Password.
Almost every big story can be split; it’s the job of the builders to break the work down into implementable pieces without losing business value or testability.
Small, well-formed stories keep planning realistic and delivery predictable.
Discussions for your team
- How can we reduce the administrative effort of splitting and merging stories?
- What criteria justify merging cards together?
- When we split stories, are keeping to INVEST?
- Do we currently have some stories that should be split?