A redditor asked the following question about breaking down complex stories.

Question#

How do you deal with relatively complex stories that PO/SM insists be broken down more when that’s not really possible?

It’s a long question. Go to Reddit to read the whole thing.

My answer#

As a developer, I don’t think story size really matters. The amount of work is the same. The only difference is how you log it in Jira. You’ll need to break it into smaller parts anyway, either before you start or while you’re working on it. If your iteration is long (a week or more) and you aim for tiny stories, you’ll just spend a lot of extra time refining everything, which is wasteful.

The tricky part is that the line between refinement (which should happen before the sprint starts) and actual work is very thin. You don’t want to over-refine or try to uncover every detail upfront.

For me, the key is to start, take a small step, commit, release to production, spread the work across developers, do it together as a team, and keep updating the plan as you learn more. The most important part is breaking big tasks into smaller chunks during the sprint. What I’ve noticed is that most teams don’t do this - they don’t break down or adjust stories once sprint planning is over. But we need to remember that the plan created at the start of the sprint isn’t set in stone.