When should user stories be combined and separated? [closed]

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As a school project, we are rolling out our initial set of user stories. Should a user story record the original idea from a user, without combining them or separate them?

For example, John added that "I want to post multiple choice questions.", and Mike added that "Except multiple questions, I want to post true/false questions." David added that "I want a confirmation box before I add questions"

Do you leave those 3 user stories as it is, or you want to combine John's and Mike's as "I want to post multiple choice and true/false questions." and within this new user story a detail like "show a conformation box before clicking the add buttion"?

What do you choose?

Answer 1

From User Stories Applied book (Mike Cohn), he talked about a "Good user story" which should have these characteristics:

I.N.V.E.S.T (Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable)

Your question falls to "Independent" characteristic. The reason to combine OR separate is depending on how to make them "independent".

The reason to split/separate story cards

• The story is bigger than one sprint
• story combine with high and low priority sub stories

The reason to combine story card

• When we see they have "dependency". And after combining, it's not gonna take more than 5 days to implement.
• After combining and it would take more than 5 days, you should find another way to split the story.

About your example:

1. I want to post multiple choice questions.
2. I want to post true/false questions.
3. show a conformation box before clicking the add button

In my opinion, I will leave them as 3 stories because they look independent. Even for "confirmation box", you can implement just a box with add button that can show alert box for confirmation without any questions. Three of them look valuable and independent by themselves. Anyway, Product Owner or Customer is the one who can tell you if the stories are valuable for them or not. So, after splitting or combining, you have to confirm with Product Owner to make sure the stories are still correct.

Answer 2

I agree with Natty that I would leave them as independent stories. Just because they are related, does not mean they have the same business priority.

For example, it is entirely possible that the client decides that multiple choice questions are the highest priority, followed by true-false questions, but the confirmation box is so low on their priority scale that they would not want it implemented should budget not cover all stories in the backlog.

For this reason alone, I would keep them independent so that I could capture that business priority on each feature.

However, if I noticed that the client was always talking about them as "one story" and prioritizing them as a group, then I might consider making a combined story for prioritization purposes that would then be broken into multiple sub-stories for the development team to estimate and deliver.