How to handle this story

Question

I am not sure when you would break story into stories or into tasks.

Let's say you have a story that talks about bringing down a service, and to do that you have to analyze and depreciate 5 api where each one takes one week

How would you do that ?

1) break story into 5 stories and this way every story is less than a sprint and can be owned by someone (but cant be demoed)

2) break a story into tasks but then multiple people is working on a single story and one story is lasting more than sprint

Other? Thank you

Answer 1

Let's say you have a story that talks about bringing down a service

Why are you doing that? Who is going to benefit from it?

That information will help you to create the story associated with the work item.

As a [person that benefits from this work] I want the service brought down so that [reason]

Now, once you have defined the user story you can then add sub-tasks to it that describe how the work will be done. e.g.

Sub-task1 = deprecate API X

Sub-task2 = deprecate API Y

Answer 2

From my point of view, the so-called story should be an epic. The epic should be split in multiple stories, each one tackling the decommissioning of a different service.

It is also equally important to split the stories into sub-tasks because you will most probably identify "hidden flaws". It will also allow you to bring more transparency in the process of completing the story. If the stories are similar from the tasking perspective, you can define the first one as a template for the other ones.

You can view this topic from a different perspective: your purpose is to remove some services that hinder your progress. After you put down one service, you are closer to the desired outcome of taking all the services down. And of course, after each decommissioned server you bring more value for you, your team, or the customer.