Have Your Slice and Eat It: Boost Quality with Vertical Story Slicing
How product features are sliced into smaller work items has a big impact on quality. Slice your epics well, and quality will follow.
Using software testing as the only approach to building a quality product is possible, but it's a costly, time-consuming way to deliver quality. Instead, think about quality as an emergent property. Many factors affect product quality. One of these is how we slice our epics and stories.
I reckon even Goldilocks would have a hard time slicing stories. It is not easy to slice them so they come out 'just right'. Just-right stories are small, testable pieces of work that deliver customer value. Well-written stories will closely mimic the INVEST principles. INVEST stands for Independent, Nominal, Valuable, Estimatable, Small, and Testable.
But unfortunately, stories written this well are atypical. Instead, stories appear vague, obscure, large, dependent and hard to test.
