Merging user stories

MKS May 12, 2015

During product backlog grooming we often encounter stories that are quite small and could be easily combined with other stories. How does one go about merging user stories in Jira? It doesn't look to me like there is a special functionality for it (link type, history). Any good practices?

Also, correspondingly, how do you best split user stories into smaller ones, preserving traceability?

3 answers

0 votes
Marlene Kegel -codefortynine- February 25, 2019

We released a Jira cloud app called Merge Agent for Jira that could solve your problem.

With our app you can easily merge the description, comments and other content of two tickets or several tickets with just a few clicks. 

Feel free to get in touch with us if you have any feedback on Merge Agent for Jira.

hcornett December 17, 2019

Why is this an app? Seems like this functionality should be part of the core product.

Like # people like this
0 votes
MKS May 13, 2015

Thank you Nicolas, but your answer doesn't really solve my problem.

My case: I already have the stories grouped under a certain epic. During the grooming we realised that one of the stories is not independent, but rather should be a part of another story as one of the acceptance criteria.

US1: As an administrator I want to see a list of all the user accounts I created 
US2: As an administrator I want to see when a user account was created
These and many other are part of an epic: Manage user accounts

What I did now, was to link US2 as related to US1 and close US2 as duplicate, but this doesn't really show what I was trying to achieve: merge two user stories into one.

During product backlog grooming, one doesn't only split epics into smaller user stories, but sometimes merges stories. I miss a proper workflow for that in JIRA Agile.

Nicolas Bourdages
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
May 13, 2015

I see. But how could there be an automated way to do that? How could JIRA "know" how excatly these stories should be merged? If simply appending the descriptions and adding the time estimates was enough, a script could do that. If you require something more complex and flexible, that's a good plugin idea, as I haven't seen anything like that on the marketplace. In the mean time, you could create a new issue link called "Merge", with the links being "Merges / Merged into". That at least would be clearer than a duplicate. https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA063/Configuring+Issue+Linking

MKS May 14, 2015

Creating a new issue link type is a good idea for starters. Thank you for that! I'd like to accept your answer but I can't cause it's here as a comment to mine answer (which should have been a comment, ouch :)). Do you want to re-post it as an answer?

0 votes
Nicolas Bourdages
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
May 13, 2015

What if you regroup these small stories under the same Epic? Since an Epic is basically a large story meant to be broken down in smaller stories, if you have small stories to begin with, regrouping them under an Epic seems to make sense, with the added benefit of having all these small stories easily accessible from within the Epic, or by filtering from the Backlog view.

Suggest an answer

Log in or Sign up to answer