Splitting out user stories into tasks, not sub-tasks, in a way that makes sense

[Ben Sinclair]

We have our engineers split user stories into smaller pieces when we start a sprint.

A single user story can end up being a big amount of work that might take more than a single sprint to complete.

Because of this, we have found sub-tasks just aren't working because we don't want some of the sub-tasks finished at the end of the sprint.

We'd rather split a user story into multiple tasks so that we can get credit for what we do complete and roll anything incomplete onto the next sprint.

The problem we are facing is we end up with a user story on the board with 0 story points and then multiple tasks that reference that story.

Take this screenshot below. The first task is the user story. The following 3 tasks relate to that user story. It's yucky.

I wonder if anyone has some wisdom on how to approach this better so that we still have a clear understanding of the original user story but we can break it down into smaller tasks without losing sight.

Thanks

Ben

[Warren]

Hi @Ben Sinclair 

I think you need to shift the hierarchy up - the user story should probably be an Epic and the tasks could then be User Stories. Epics can span sprints which gets around your problem, plus you are then able to split User Stories down into subtasks if you want to.