Splitting a Story

Scrum Teams very often rely on their Product Owners (PO) to create and manage the product backlog and sprint backlog. The POs are solely responsible for defining the epics, features and user stories. Very often we have seen that during a sprint a user story doesn't meet it's objective. As we know that user stories are defined to meet their sprint goal and that should be the only objective a PO should keep in mind.

We rely on the PO to decide if he/she needs to split the stories. But that shouldn't be the case for any agile set-up. A cross-functional team takes responsibilities together and works together to achieve the sprint goal. A PO shouldn't try to split the stories alone. The key stake holders in this activity should be the PO, the SM(Scrum Master) and the Scrum Team(Development team).

The benefits of engaging the scrum team is to give the team members a sense that this is their product and they are responsible for it's success.

Below are a few benefits that can be realized:

1. A sense of engagement and ownership by the scrum team for the product
2. Increase understanding during the user story defining, refining and splitting phase
3. Drive better ideas and innovations which can lead to lesser time-to-market for the product
4. Better and accurate estimations for the stories
5. Reduction of technical debt and rework
6. Lesser reliance on program level stakeholders

This often helps the agile team drive the program by Lean principles - respect for people, innovation and relentless improvement.

It also results in better build-in quality, manage variability and use informed decision via fast feedback during the story refinement process.

References:

Scale-Agile Framework

User Stories Applied - Mike Cohn