Issue Decomposition

Transform high-level project descriptions into well-structured GitHub issues. Each issue includes a user story, acceptance criteria, dependencies, labels, and effort estimates. The skill follows the INVEST principles to ensure issues are independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, small, and testable.

Supported coding agents⌗

How to use it⌗

Use this skill when:

• You have a feature or project to break down into tasks
• You need to create structured GitHub issues from a description
• During project planning to generate actionable work items
• Converting requirements into well-formed issues

Features⌗

Complete issue templates Each generated issue includes a user story, description, acceptance criteria with checkboxes, dependency mapping, labels, and a story-point estimate on the powers-of-two scale from the Estimating Work Items skill.

Structured decomposition process Walks through understanding scope, identifying major components, generating issues, mapping dependencies, and previewing before creation.

Label taxonomy and estimation guidelines Uses a consistent label system for type, area, priority, and points-<n> estimates. Issues are capped at 8 points; anything bigger becomes an epic, is decomposed into children, and takes the sum of their points.

Preview before creating Always shows a summary table of proposed issues with titles, estimates, and dependencies before creating anything in GitHub.

Worked example included Includes a sample decomposition of “Build a user authentication system” into 7 dependency-linked issues, showing exactly what the output looks like.