Sets of Stories - Managed as a single entity?

[PaulB]

We have 2-3 PMs who are responsible for various areas of
functionality. They typically have one or two epic stories that they
need to break down into component stories (no problem here). In some
cases, each story is releasable individually, but in other cases they
desire that the feature be “launched” when a sub-set of stories are
complete. (problem) They see a couple of sets in their minds,
including; minimal launch and the ideal launch set.

The challenge is that they want to treat this "story set" more like a
single entity, moving it through process essentially like a single
story. They might reorder from within the set, but if you move the
set they all go along and stay in the same relative order.

This is especially important since once they create their set, the
Uber-PM then will reorder and plan amongst these sets of stories and
all the individual stories. Tagging provides a level of relief in
some products, but isn’t 100% ideal, since you have to remember and
manage the tags.

Ideally (or one way) to handle this would be that an epic story could
exist on the backlog along with it’s children. . . .

Thoughts on how to solve this?

-Paul

[Luanne]

Couple different ways you could approach this

- Epics, as you mention, could be created for each "story set". When
you are planning and prioritizing you can display the Epic field on
the grid so that you can
make sure you are prioritizing/planning these together.

- Feature groups could also be used. You could create a feature group
for a "story set", assign the appropriate stories to their feature
group and use filtering on the feature group to plan the work.

-Luanne