Agile Glossary

Story Splitting

What is Story Splitting?

Before a user story is ready to be scheduled for implementation in an upcoming iteration, it should be “small enough,” the usual rule of thumb being “a story that can be completed within the iteration”. However, many user stories start out larger than that. “Splitting” consists of breaking up one user story into smaller ones while preserving the property that each user story separately has measurable business value.

Further Reading

There is surprisingly little consensus on how to split stories, possibly because approaches to doing so are sensitive to the business domain. The following is a sample of postings on the topic:

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Additional Agile Glossary Terms

Business agility is the ability of an organization to sense changes internally or externally and respond accordingly in order to deliver value to its customers.
Definition of Ready involves creating clear criteria that a user story must meet before being accepted into an upcoming iteration. This is typically based on the INVEST matrix.
Sprint planning is an event that occurs at the beginning of a sprint where the team determines the product backlog items they will work on during that sprint and discusses their initial plan for completing those product backlog items.
The daily meeting is structured around the following three questions: What have you completed? What will you do next? What is getting in your way?
An iteration is a timebox during which development takes place. The duration may vary from project to project and is usually fixed.
A product backlog is a list of the new features, changes to existing features, bug fixes, infrastructure changes or other activities that a team may deliver in order to achieve a specific outcome.
A high-level summary of the project's key success factors displayed on one wall of the team room as a flipchart-sized sheet of paper.

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