In pursuit of breaking down a user story to make it fit within a sprint, scrum teams are often challenged to find the right way to do this. At the end of the day a story should still deliver a verifiable value for the customer and if this cannot be established we have a tell tail sign of trouble.
Consider a user story asking for a car to have wheels so it can travel over a paved road. Reducing the scope of work by breaking this story into four stories, one for each wheel, is one sure way to release a car with a missing wheel. A better approach is to break out a story for alloyed wheels or plastic covers to give a nicer look to the wheels, but ensure the car either has wheels or not at all.
As Product Owners we should help our teams to decompose user stories the right way. We know that those breakout stories (that lessen the scope and size of the original story) left for future sprint(s) will live their own lives on the release backlog. They may be trumped by other stories competing for our time and attention and ultimately stay behind and not make it into a released product.
Just say ‘No’ to the cars with missing wheels!
