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

In software development, an "estimate" is the evaluation of the effort necessary to carry out a given development task; this is most often expressed in terms of duration.
Lead Time is the time between a customer order and delivery. In software development, it can also be the time between a requirement made and its fulfillment.
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.

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