Best Approach for Subtasks for a User Story

Question

what happens if you have a backend task, UI Test, and Testing tasks under one User Story. The backend task needs to be completed before the UI work starts. All the tasks are under one User Story in the sprint. The Backend task is completed. The UI tasks will probably not be completed in that Sprint. How do you carry over the UI task for that User Story to the next Sprint?

Is a good approach instead of creating Sub Tasks for a User Story. separate tasks for Backend and UI work?

Can you move a User Story between different sprints?

Can you move subtasks to different sprints?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Yes, it does sound like you probably need to split the story into two - one for back-end and the other for UI.  This is not because it doesn't fit, but it sounds like there are two different teams that will be working on the groups of tasks.  A story really should be mostly done by one team (the idea is that a team can tackle anything, although in the real world, that means "anything in our field, and we might borrow people sometimes if there's something way off pitch")

And, definitely if one type of work has to be completed before the other.  That's a dependency.  Done within a single story, again it's down to "can the whole team deal with all the work" or not.  If it's two teams, you want two stories, one with a dependency on the other.

With Scrum, one of the important things is that the team does not over-promise on its ability to deliver something.  It needs to deliver something that moves everything forward, but if a story is too big for a sprint, that can't happen.  If a story looks too big for a sprint, it is.  Split it up into smaller stories that can be delivered as committed to.

Your stories should always be achievable within a sprint.

Given a list of X that you committed to, it's not uncommon to not quite do it, and have some stories left over.  Those carry over into the next sprint, and are counted there.

You may have noticed I've not mentioned sub-tasks yet.  That's because they are a part of a story or issue.  They aren't really relevant.  The sprint, the velocity, the reporting, all of scrum is looking at the stories, not bits of them.

And to your last point "All the subtasks will not be completed in one sprint." - nope.  If you aren't able to complete all the subtasks in a sprint, then you're not completing what you committed to.  Your stories and/or sprints are the wrong size.  That screams "split the story up during backlog refinement"

Beverly_5ttfde · Answer

How do you handle a User Story with Subtasks that will span over multiple sprints?

All the subtasks will not be completed in one sprint.

Beverly_5ttfde · Answer

Thank You. I have an additional question about  Splitting up the stories?

Answer received:

Possibly, it depends on how you are splitting the workup.  If you want to be able to say "Backed done while UI still needs work", then you will have to split the story into story-back-end and story-ui, with their component sub-tasks.

Using this approach would I create two user stories. One User story for the backend with subtasks and another User story for the UI with subtasks?

The backend work has to be completed before the UI work starts. Currently, I have One User Story with subtasks for Backend, UI Testing. When I start a sprint all of the subtasks will not be completed in one sprint. The only subtask that will be completed is Backend in the first sprint.

You can move User Stories to another sprint. Question:  can move a User Story that is in a sprint and the sprint has closed?