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As per the 'I'**NVEST philosophy, user stories should be Independent as it allows for true prioritization of each and every story. When dependencies come into play it may not be possible to implement a valuable story without implementing other much less valuable stories.

Now as part of my Project we are building a profile page for the user as part of this epic, we have stories for UX design, Front end development(which depends on UX) and then the back-end development(which depends on front-end) creating a dependency in the stories

How do we resolve this issue of Independent stories in UI based applications where the UX design always informs the development team ??

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Vertical slices minimize dependencies between stories

You are attempting to horizontally slice the larger epic (by architecture) into user stories:

we have stories for UX design, Front end development(which depends on UX) and then the back-end development(which depends on front-end)

Instead, try to create vertical slices of the larger epic. This will minimize dependencies between stories.

Peter Green suggests four approaches to vertical slicing:

  • Vague terms provide opportunities to slice by using an incremental approach.
  • Conjunctions provide opportunities to slice by using an incremental approach.
  • Each acceptance criteria could become its own vertical slice.
  • One little piece of the user's workflow at a time.

Vertically sliced stories

The following links in the above post may provide additional help for vertical slicing:

Chris Sims blogged about a similar four step approach

Christiaan Verwijs uses eight ways to split

Richard Lawrence has nine strategies for splitting stories

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  • Hi Ashok ..Thanks for the response !! So you mean we should have one user stories for lets say each piece of the user's workflow and have the UX, front end & back-end as the tasks ?? The problem with that is UX team feels that they can be more effective they come up with a holistic design for the feature rather than a single workflow..which will involve rework at their end .... Any thoughts ??? how to convince them ?
    – user5704279
    Dec 26, 2017 at 15:38
  • Thanks Ashok for the response ... Unfortunately the UX team feels that they woll be more effective if they provide a complete UX design keeping the Users holistic experience in mind.. creating UX stories for each workflow will involve rework for them ... Any thoughts ?? How do I convince them the other way ?
    – user5704279
    Dec 26, 2017 at 15:43
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    The Scrum Guide says, "Scrum recognizes no sub-teams in the Development Team, regardless of domains that need to be addressed...". Ideally you should have one cross-functional team, not a separate UX sub-team. However, this cannot be accomplished quickly. It will take time. In the meantime, do what best you can and work towards that. Also, when you work on vertical slices, some amount of code refactoring becomes necessary. Don't think of that as "avoidable" rework.
    – Ashok Ramachandran
    Dec 26, 2017 at 15:53

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