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  • 1.  how to relate two or more user stories

    Posted Jan 29, 2020 12:51 PM
    I know that user stories can have dependencies and that you can create a parent story with children stories. The situation I have is when I have two "related" stories that do not fall into either of these categories but I want to make sure I know that they both exist so that when I'm reading or working on story 1 I see that story 2 is out there (either completed or in the backlog) and that it relates to story 1.

    the relationship isn't strong enough to be a dependency because there is no requirement that one get done before the other. And the parent/child relationship doesn't work because I don't see them as being part of a larger "thing" (feature, goal, etc.). Currently I just put something in the Description, such as "See also USxxx and then provide a link to that user story. this "works" but such as link isn't discoverable on any views or reports (I can't add a column to a view which is would be really helpful).

    Just curious if others relate their stories and how they do it. Custom fields? dependencies?

    TIA,

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    Karen Gwynn
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  • 2.  RE: how to relate two or more user stories

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Jan 29, 2020 01:03 PM
    Hi Karen,

    I would recommend that you use the dependency capability. You can then ignore whether it is show as red or grey in the UI. At least you would have it logged somewhere.

    I am, however, curious about your use case. It sounds as if you are saying that it is not quite of interest to you to have a definite dependency, but it is really. I deduce this from the "but I want to make sure" bit of the sentence.

    Can you elaborate on what you mean by "it relates to"?

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    Nik
    Ask me a question, I'm All Ears!
    Rally Sales Engineer
    Rally Software
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  • 3.  RE: how to relate two or more user stories

    Posted Jan 29, 2020 01:58 PM
    I think the idea is that two stories may be related, but not a time-sensitive dependency. The dependency functionality calls one a predecessor and the other a successor, rather than saying these two things are connected but not specifically dependent on each other.

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    Terry Ginzburg
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  • 4.  RE: how to relate two or more user stories

    Posted Jan 30, 2020 02:45 PM
    Nik
    thanks for your responses. I have a use case that might shed some light on what I'm trying to do.

    I just uncovered a defect in an area of our application that was recently changed. This is a scenario that is related to some relatively new functionality, so I'm surprised that its happening. Upon investigating the previous work to see if we missed something when the enhancement was done. Turns out I uncovered a "one-off" scenario that we just didn't anticipate in original work (which was focused primarily on importing records; the issue uncovered now was not during import).

    So in writing up this new defect, I don't want to attach it to the original (no closed) user story. That story was correct as written. But I do want to make sure that once a developer starts looking into this, they can reference the original work, as they may find some useful information that can help them fix the issue. So I want to "link" the new defect to the original user story, which is connected to our Git repository and the history of all the original work. But it is not a defect to the story; it is not a dependency; and of course, there is not a parent/child relationship.

    What I have is an informational relationship that I want to create between a new defect and a closed user story.

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    Karen Gwynn
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  • 5.  RE: how to relate two or more user stories
    Best Answer

    Posted Jan 30, 2020 05:05 PM
    Create a non-mandatory custom field named something like "Related to" where you can enter a US# of a related story.  That field can be included as a field on various story views and would be searchable in the universal search box.