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"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?

A: 

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.

Peter Stuer
Thanks Peter. What you are suggesting actually the same thing as grouping stories into themes. What I actually ask is how to provide business value, demonstrate that value and let our customers to prioritize. With an ongoing work among sprints, we make our PO to not prioritize. This is against agility.
In your questoin you stated "Splitting it into sub stories is impossible cause the modifications has no business value". My first reaction was to question that, but I decided that was not fair, and treated your position as a correct interpretaion of atomic business value. Any subpart has business value 0, and only as the whole is put into place does the work produce value >0. Assuming that I see no other option than to create derivative value as an indicator of progress towards a future value point with no other indication than a milestone delivery.
Peter Stuer
See also http://stackoverflow.com/questions/961654/how-to-maintain-a-design-specification-in-a-scrum-environment/961741#961741 , where you might consider treating that part as a non-agile subproject in itself.
Peter Stuer
A: 

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,

Rob Wells
Thanks Rob. This is not an answer to my question, what you have described here is kind of standarts mostly described by Mike Cohn, and they are very easy to find on web. Also these are suitable for functional stories. But what I need is about non-functional stories or constraints of a system.

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