Story Splitting: Lessons from 15 years of Teaching It

Session Overview:

Since publishing “Patterns for Splitting User Stories” in 2007 and following up a few years later with the wildly popular “How to Split a User Story” flowchart, Richard Lawrence has taught thousands of people how to find good vertical slices for their backlogs. This enormous body of practice has revealed some important lessons about what works and what doesn’t in story splitting.

You can find Richard’s story splitting patterns and flowchart in the comprehensive “Humanizing Work Guide to Splitting User Stories” at https://www.humanizingwork.com/the-humanizing-work-guide-to-splitting-user-stories/. Instead of repeating that content, this session will dive into the key lessons Richard has learned in a decade and a half of helping practitioners apply story splitting in a variety of real world contexts.

About Our Featured Speaker:

Richard Lawrence’s superpower is bringing together seemingly unrelated fields and ideas to create new possibilities. Drawing on a diverse background in software development, engineering, anthropology, design, and political science, Richard trains and coaches people to collaborate more effectively with other people to solve complex, meaningful problems.

Richard is a Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise Coach and Certified Scrum Trainer, as well as a certified trainer of the accelerated learning method, Training from the Back of the Room. His book, Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber, was published by Addison-Wesley in 2019 (for more information, visit bddwithcucumber.com). When he’s not working with clients, you’ll often find Richard cooking, playing music, practicing Muay Thai, or flying down a slope on his mountain bike.