I wrote some user stories for a new feature today. I tried to break them down into sensible chunks, as you do. Each story should bring value to the user, be independent of any other stories and be small enough to be tackled by a developer.
Well, turns out, when I ran my stories by our senior engineer, he was immediately able to break them down further. In hindsight, it totally made sense. I even briefly contemplated to break out some of the aspects of the stories when I was writing them but then thought that it would be ok. Of course not! I should have totally gone with my instinct and broken them down further.
But I guess the learning is that the story should always be as small as possible. And if you think it’s small, then still try to make it even smaller. Which makes complete sense because the amount of times that I picked up a story and think: "ah, this is not too bad…" and then five days later still hadn’t finished it… yeah. This has happened to me so many times.