Infrastructual user story problem

Question

"We need to show quotes related with the current document."

This user story will cause many of our subsystems to get modified, and it is more or less 4-5 sprint length. Splitting it into sub stories is impossible cause the modifications has no business value. But, in the 5th sprint, there will a business value.

What do you suggest? How are we gonna create business value, demonstrate it to our customers each sprint and also let our customers to prioritize work on each sprint?

Answer 1

Make your team create the tasks needed to complete the "show quotes" story.
Make these fine grained enough that several of them potentially fit into a sprint.
Put all of these in a separate backlog.
Have the team, not the customer, prioritize this backlog, and cluster tasks with high coherence into chunks.
These chunks go into the project backlog as "reduction of x% of work left to complete 'show quotes'", or a similar formulation quantifying the benefit this item will bring in terms of expected progress towards the goal.

Answer 2

G'day,

In order to make your user story a bit more descriptive, can you add:

• the type of user that is performing this user story, and
• a reason why you want to do this to your current user story.

Maybe try using the template:

As a "type of user", I want "some goal" so that "some reason".

for your user stories.

As an example, your user story might then finish up being:

As an story writer, I need to show quotes from other documents that I am using in the current document so that any quotes may be correctly attributed.

Here this would then break down into several finer grained user stories.

• Creation of DB to store the quotes and their origins
• Cross-reference DB to start storing off quotes under their topic to assist future searches.
• The editor for the new document being developed would need to be able to generate and append a bibliography.
• etc.

Generally, if you can't break your user story down into single sprint chunks, it's a sign that the user story is too large. Using the above template helps minimise this.

HTH

cheers,