Splitting stories
A story you can't estimate is a story you can't ship. Splitting is the move that gets it back on the board.
Most "we can't estimate this" conversations are splitting conversations in disguise. The team doesn't have a number-and-effort problem; they have a too-many-unknowns problem. Splitting reduces the unknowns until the story has the shape of work that's been done before, and the cards converge.
The pages below cover the techniques and the diagnostic signals — the smells that tell you a story needs splitting before you bother voting.
Techniques
- SPIDR splitting
- User-story splitting patterns
- Splitting by workflow steps
- Horizontal vs vertical slicing
- Definition of ready
- Splitting by acceptance criteria
Smells: when to stop estimating and start splitting
Adjacent reading: common mistakes covers what goes wrong inside the session itself; example estimations walks specific story shapes through the conversations they need.