Breaking Down User Stories

Developing successful software is much more than mere coding. The aspects of completely catering to requirements, assuring quality standards, considering time and budget, and many more parameters contribute to its success.

User stories are integral components of the software development process. They describe what actions the user can perform with the system — in other words, the description of software features. Generally, a developer working in an agile development process will spend most of their time in a sprint working on user stories.

In addition to user stories, a developer might work on a task — which is a single unit of work or step in the development process — or pull requests — which is the action performed by the developer when they intend to merge the new changes into the existing code. Regardless of the unit of work, breaking down the whole idea of the end product into these components for continuous delivery is significant.

However, many organizations make the mistake of scoping the entire feature into a single massive user story, which leads to missed requirements, delayed project completion, budget overruns, unsatisfied customers, and the like. Instead, user stories that are broken down into smaller segments can be helpful because they encourage knowledge sharing, manageability, and faster reviews. Most importantly, smaller tasks usually mean simpler requirements, simpler implementation, and it is quicker to do a more thorough review, all of which help with managing risk.

This article highlights the significance and process of having small stories.

When to Break Down the Stories

In software development, tickets are used to track the user stories and carry additional information, such as who is responsible for a particular story, how the story is progressing, and its current status.

Large tickets are complex to process and may delay the subsequent sprints, leading to the missed completion of software features. Therefore, breaking them down into smaller tickets is a practical approach.

However, breaking down stories only makes sense in some scenarios; there may be too many interconnected requirements or dependencies. Additionally, you have to ensure that the parts you break the ticket into each have value and deliver a feature or output to the end user.

With that being said, breaking down a story is practical under the following conditions:

1. The combined idea is too complex to implement.

2. The story alone represents a risk to the sprint goals.

3. The smaller tickets can be completed independently.

Disadvantages of Large Stories

This section covers some of the disadvantages of having large user stories and how they can hinder the effective completion of sprints.

Complexity

Large user stories are complicated. For instance, the simple story of user registration involves some tasks, such as authentication via email or phone, checking incomplete fields, ensuring a strong password, and so on. It can make the handling of the whole ticket in one sprint hard, causing the task to be delayed to the next sprint. Therefore, breaking large tasks into smaller parts can give the developer the efficiency of having subtasks that can be handled in one sprint.

Missing Edge Cases

Edge cases are scenarios or problems that do not follow a normal or expected path. They usually exist at the minimum and maximum boundaries of the system. When developing software, you must consider edge cases to ensure a functional, usable, and quality outcome. A complicated task or user story can often lose sight of the edge cases, paving the way for failure. Breaking tickets down into smaller components helps to identify these edge cases early.

Less Knowledge Sharing

Large tickets mean fewer developers are working on the same application or feature, meaning that one or two individuals hold all the knowledge about the application. Their absence can lead to the severe failure of the system. Smaller tickets help facilitate knowledge sharing by virtue of having more tickets to assign to more developers.

Complicated User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

If you are working on a large ticket, the user will only be able to test the features once the task is complete. This can complicate UAT as the Quality Assurance Analyst has to test multiple functionalities in one go, which may require a long time to complete. This may also lead to superficial testing due to complexity, which can cause regressions and missed requirements.

Advantages of Small Tickets

Now that you’ve seen the disadvantages of large user stories, let’s look at the advantages of small tickets and how they can help in an effective development process.

Continuous and Easy Product Shipping

Breaking down a large, complicated user story into small tickets reduces the complexity of the task. This allows developers to work in parallel, enabling the completion of more features in less time, which leads to fewer dependencies and continuous feature delivery.

Faster Pull Request Reviews

If the tickets are small, the pull requests will have fewer lines and lower complexity, simplifying the pull request review process. It also speeds up the review process, allowing for a faster delivery of software features that adds efficiency to the whole software development cycle.

Fewer Bugs and Easy Testing

Smaller tickets allow multiple individuals to work on the project, which leads to shared knowledge and easy identification and solving of bugs. Also, the divided user story should be testable independently, making the process easy and faster. It’s not that bugs don’t occur in small tickets, but tracing and resolving them is easier.

Conclusion

The development process becomes much more straightforward when you break down user stories into smaller bits. The division of tasks leads to reduced complexity, shared knowledge, fewer bugs, and faster product delivery.

Breaking down your tickets is a great way to reduce the complexity and challenge of implementing tasks. Similarly, you can simplify your entire team management process for your restaurant using 7shifts, a full-featured toolkit that allows you to easily manage your restaurant operations. You can book a demo today to see how 7shifts can streamline your team management and scheduling.

Technical Writer: Kainaat Arshad (https://portal.draft.dev/writers/recfth4ItCcu4FpRP)