Advanced Story Mapping Tool

Story mapping is a collaborative and visual technique wherein agile teams come together to plan new products or new product features.

Story mapping session is typically a workshop which may be conducted in the form of a requirements brainstorming session or as a focused group wherein each agile team member contributes to developing the story map, adding clarity through adding various releases to the stories in the map and can see overall direction of the feature development in the upcoming future.

A story map consists of a a product backbone, user activities, user tasks, user stories and releases mapped in a 2 dimensional visual form.

Jeff Patton started to use story mapping as a concept that complements the traditional backlog of user stories, providing a visual overview of the product being built through a simple two-dimensional structure.

Story mapping process is generally comprised of following steps:
1. Discover project goals
2. User persona creation
3. User journey mapping
4. Come up with solutions
5. Prioritizing
6. Slice out the MVP and the release structure

User story workshop is same as story mapping session wherein each agile team member contributes to developing the story map, prioritize the stories in it, discuss detailed functionality of each user story. User story workshop also gives agile teams the opportunity to clarify doubts and resolve conflicting views.

Story mapping is important because it is extremely useful in giving visual and two dimensional picture of the entire range of product features while at the same time letting the team members know which release what features are currently being worked on.

In order make a story map physically, start by drawing a horizontal line on a whiteboard or large paper on which first you will write the key user goals/activities underneath, from left to right. These will be course grained functionalities of the product and written in a chronological order from left to right. For each user activity draw a vertical lines that cut through and write user tasks (steps) in it. Under each task, there will be a varied number of user stories that describe given user task in greater detail.

User story in Agile is an elemental piece of feature or a product requirement that can be effectively prioritized and assigned estimate by dev teams.

A good user story is easy to read, written from the user’s perspective, has a clear goal and benefit clause, and it will have clear acceptance criteria.

Acceptance criteria of a user story describes what exactly will make or mark the user story as successfully implemented. In turn it is the test criteria that will eventually lead to end users pass (or fail) an implemented user story.

Story map is used in conjunction and as an effectivity tool along with conventional agile development tools. Conventional backlog is a linear tool which has a set of epics, user stories stated in a linear manner which is hard to ready especially as the product gets evolved or complicated. Story mapping is very effective as it is visual and 2 D in nature and gives all stakeholders, especially users of the system an easy way to understand the big picture in the quickest possible way.

User story is written collaboratively by the agile team while it is developed to serve the requirements of the end users, various agile roles such as product manager, product owner, dev teams, qa teams, scrum master contribute to adding to it in their own ways.

Typically story mapping session will involve each agile team or roles including but not limited to end users, product managers, product owners, business analysts, architects, developers, QA teams, design teams, project manager or scrum master.

User persona is a fictional and generalized characters that represent target user group of the product or solution being built. It has a set of common characteristics/patterns/beliefs. It is typically also associated with a picture of that representative person. For e.g. the target user of the given product is a working professional with age in the a certain range and salary in a certain range, and one who has a certain set of hobbies.

Releases are the chunks of features, user stories that the end users will get to use at the end or release timeline.

Slicing the backlog into releases is an iterative activity wherein prioritized user stories from the backlog are mapped into the releases. While doing this, dependencies and other constraints among user stories are also taken into account.

Brainstorming of the user stories can be done through usage of following proven techniques such as coming up with ideas, prioritizing ideas and then marking the most useful ideas for further thinking. You can also utilize some specialized brainstorming techniques such as role storming wherein participants are asked to imagine as if they are real users and through that role play the team arrives at newer perspectives.

Prioritization is crucial while working with user stories from a story map because it helps stakeholders arrive at consensus over which requirements are more valuable and feasible to implement, as compared to others.

There are several methods for prioritizing user stories. Some of the most known are MoSCoW (Must have, Should should, Could have, Will not have), Classifying (High, Medium, Low) , and Ranking. There are few other methods too which are used whenever situation demands, such as Voting, Timeboxing and Trade-offs.

The purpose of creating product backbone is to come up with the core features or user activities in a product being built such that it depicts the customer experience/journey of the product across the horizontal axis.

Story map can typically be converted into conventional product backlog through integration between respective tools. Such integration supports mapping of user activities and epics to epics in a conventional product backlog whereas user stories are then mapped to respective user activities/epics.

MVP (minimum viable product) or MVP release is a well thought combination of user stories from various epics, such that will give customers a slice of the product functionality that is simple, yet serves a significant function. MVP also facilitates early feedback from the users.

In agile software development, epics are a summary of a feature of the product. User stories are often part of the epic and describe specific user actions that need to happen to achieve a larger goal.