Agilefant2

Say you've created a task called "Create system component X" to the product or project backlog and the story contains a rough description and is rather big in terms of story point estimate. Now you have much more information concerning that story, actually the initial story consists of ten smaller stories and maybe something that hasn't yes been discovered. What to do? Remove the initial story and create ten new ones? We say no.

With the Agilefant 2.0 you can split stories and form a story hierarchy, the initial story becomes the parent of the new stories. This enable backwards traceability for stories. If the story that you're splitting is in a project or an iteration backlog, the child stories will be placed in that backlog and the parent story will be moved to the product backlog. You might wonder why, but it's simple, you don't want to have the same story twice in the project (as iterations are transparent). Otherwise your project burnup would contain twice the story points of the spliced story.

What we call story splitting is the very core process of refining requirements, and our goal is to provide support for this operation. The story hierarchy provides crucial information why something is done. Implementable stories are often very restricted, which in turn interferes with understanding larger contexts that may very well be helpful while implementing the story.

Currently while splitting a story you can see the existing children of that story (previous splits) as well as the possible parent story for that story. You can also edit the story under splitting while creating new child stories. We hope these details help when making splitting decisions.