Story Splitting for Agile Product Development
Published by Pearson
Break your backlog into manageable user stories for faster delivery
Course Outcomes:
- Equip yourself with practical, easy-to-apply guidelines and patterns to effectively navigate the most common product-ownership challenges when decomposing work items into small, valuable stories.
- Learn state-of-the-art agile analysis skills for optimizing your team’s ability to deliver value frequently to stakeholders.
- Communicate and apply these techniques within your organization, fostering a culture of effective backlog management and continuous value delivery.
Join industry expert Howard Podeswa in this comprehensive course designed to transform how you approach an essential aspect of product backlog refinement: story-splitting. Story-splitting is the breaking down of large backlog items into small, valuable User Stories. This process is critical to agile development, enabling faster time to market, frequent product improvements and accelerated learning. Mastering this skill, however, can be challenging, as it requires creating work items that are impactful, yet small enough to be completed in a short period (e.g., 1 sprint or iteration).
In this live course, you'll learn practical guidelines for excelling in this skill, using 13 story-splitting patterns from the author’s acclaimed book The Agile Guide to Business Analysis and Planning, which incorporates the Lawrence and SAFe contributions. You'll gain valuable insights into when and how to apply each pattern and explore real-world scenarios that illustrate their application. You’ll engage in hands-on workshops that reinforce learning and develop actionable story-splitting skills you can apply immediately on the job to enable the frequent delivery of value to stakeholders.
What you’ll learn and how you can apply it
- Understand the concept of story-splitting and its critical role in effective agile product development.
- Apply 13 story-splitting patterns to break down features and development work into small, valuable User Stories.
- Identify the appropriate timing for facilitating story-splitting sessions and select the participants best-suited for those discussions.
This live event is for you because...
- This course is designed for both new and experienced Product Owners, Proxy Product Owners, Product Managers, Business Analysts, and other team members involved in product backlog refinement, such as UX designers, programmers, and testers.
- Additionally, Scrum Masters, Agile coaches, Project Managers and practice leads will benefit from this training.
Prerequisites
- A basic understanding of agile development, Scrum, and User Stories is helpful but not necessary.
Recommended Preparation
- Attend: Agile Analysis and Planning by Howard Podeswa
- Read Section 13.13, “Patterns for Splitting Stories” from The Agile Guide to Business Analysis and Planning by Howard Podeswa
Recommended Follow-up
- Attend: Story Mapping for Agile Release Planning by Howard Podeswa
- Read: The Agile Guide to Business Analysis and Planning by Howard Podeswa
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
Segment 1: Overview of Story-Splitting (50 minutes)
- What is story-splitting?
- Story-splitting Benefits and Challenges
- When to begin splitting; how much to do upfront
- Triad context for story-splitting
- Story-splitting terminology
- Specifying Stories: templates vs. informal options
- Story-splitting Guidelines: 3Cs, Bill Wake’s INVEST, vertical slicing, size limits, tie-breaker guidelines -Exercise: Evaluate proposals for splitting stories based on the guidelines in this segment
Q&A (5 minutes) Break (5 minutes)
Segment 2: Patterns 1-4 (50 minutes)
- What is a pattern?
- Pattern 1: Workflow Steps
- Pattern 2: Business Rules
- Pattern 3: Large Initial Effort
- Pattern 4: Multiple Use-Case Scenarios (Simple/Complex)
- Exercise: Applying and identifying patterns 1-4; specifying remedies using patterns 1-4.
Q&A (5 minutes) Break (5 minutes)
Segment 3: Patterns 5-9 (50 minutes)
- Pattern 5: Data Complexity
- Pattern 6: Complex UI
- Pattern 7: NFR Implementation
- Pattern 8: Multiple User Goals
- Pattern 9: Uncertainty
- Exercise: Applying and identifying patterns 5-9; specifying remedies using patterns 5-9.
Q&A (5 minutes) Break (5 minutes)
Segment 4: Patterns 10-13 (50 minutes)
- Pattern 10: Integration Capabilities
- Pattern 11: Multiple Devices, Platforms
- Pattern 12: Multiple User Roles or Personas
- Pattern 13: Too Many Acceptance Criteria
- Exercise: Applying and identifying patterns 10-13; specifying remedies using patterns 10-13.
Q&A (5 minutes)
Course wrap-up and next steps (5 minutes)
Your Instructor
Howard Podeswa
Howard Podeswa is a thought leader in the intersection of agile and business analysis. For over twenty years, he has been helping large organizations adapt and optimize their business analysis and planning practices for agile software development approaches. He is the author of the popular book on agile analysis The Agile Guide to Business Analysis and Planning: From Strategic Plan to Continuous Value Delivery (2021, Pearson). Previous publications include UML for the IT Business Analyst, 2nd Ed. (2009) and The Business Analyst’s Handbook (2008). At Noble Inc., he has provided agile and business analysis services to clients worldwide, including the International Standards Organization (ISO), Moody’s, the Mayo Clinic, TELUS, TD Bank, LabCorp, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Mawer Investment Management Ltd., Bell Nexia, and REI Coop.
Howard is a widely requested speaker at international BA and agile events, including Festival of Business Analysis (IIBA Australia, 2023), International BA Istanbul (2021), European BA Day (Frankfurt, 2020), the Toronto Agile Community Conference (2015), the BBC Conference (2016, 2014), the agile Norway Developers Conference (NDC 2013), the BA Forum (Poland) and BA World conferences across North America. He is also a professional artist whose works have been shown extensively in commercial and public galleries. His exhibitions include Dépaysement | Studio (Birch Contemporary, 2022) and “A Brief History” (Kelowna Art Gallery 2017, Koffler 2016).