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

Three amigos refers to the primary perspectives to examine an increment of work before, during, and after development. Those perspectives are: Business - What problem are we trying to solve? Development - How might we build a solution to solve that problem? Testing - What about this, what could possibly happen?
The Given-When-Then formula is a template intended to guide the writing of acceptance tests for a User Story: (Given) some context, (When) some action is carried out, (Then) a particular set of observable consequences should obtain.
Version control is not merely "good practice" but an enabler of a number of Agile practices, such as continuous integration
Antipatterns are common solutions to common problems where the solution is ineffective and may result in undesired consequences.
Backlog grooming is when the product owner and some, or all, of the rest of the team refine the backlog on a regular basis to ensure the backlog contains the appropriate items, that they are prioritized, and that the items at the top of the backlog are ready for delivery.
Burndown charts and burnup charts track the amount of output (in terms of hours, story points, or backlog items) a team has completed across an iteration or a project.

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