Recreation of user stories for common functionality/screens between Releases?

Question

To provide a background, we have created UI forms from Business Unit A for the end users to fill. Once completed/filled the UI form flows through the defined workflow, where different users in different roles review this form.

In a previous release we created stories for the UI forms (from BU A) and separate stories to define the workflow which has now been implemented. We are in the next continuation release now and we are required to add new UI forms from Business Unit B. But we need to use the same workflow.

Do we need to write new stories or clone previous stories in this Release for our Development team to be able to re create the workflow for these new forms from BU B? They have mentioned that we need to provide them a way to account for this work, even though it might be recreating what was originally already done.

Is there a way to provide requirements for items that might be needed to be recreated in future release, noting that there might be minor tweaks to what currently exists as we go along from one release to the next.

Answer 1

You are thinking of user requirements in terms of tasks rather than user stories. An example of this is separating out the form creation from the workflow when really both are required to provide business value.

A user story should be focused on something that provides business value. For example:

As a member of Business Unit 'A' I need to write a financial report, have it reviewed and then passed to the customer so that I can keep the customer informed about their finances.

That story might then have some sub-tasks:

Task 1 - Create a UI form that captures the financial data

Task 2 - Build the workflow for a financial report

If you adopt this approach to writing user stories then you no longer have the issue of recreating the same user stories for different requirements. You may well have similar tasks associated with these stories, but that should not be an issue.

Answer 2

It sounds like you are having an engineering issue! Why would you have to create the same workflow? That sounds like the original engineering work no longer meets the needs of the business. If the system was engineered in a way that you can reuse components and forms then you would not need to do the same thing again.

If this is the first time that this has happened then I would focus on paying back your technical debt and making the stuff that you have already created reusable.

If this constantly happens then I would focus on creating professional teams that embody engineering excellence and can build high quality software that meets the businesses needs.