A user story map arranges user stories into a useful model to help understand the functionality of the system, identify holes and omissions in your backlog, and effectively plan holistic releases that deliver value to users and business with each release (from Jeff Patton's The New User Story Backlog Is a Map).
Does work get lost in your backlog never to be seen again or forgotten about under it is too late? Do you get into discussions or arguments about efforts only to discover that you are not ready to cross that bridge? Do you know the business value or direction of a story or a release? Do you have an understanding of how the feature you are working on gets the user to where they want to go?
When you get lost and you need to find major landmarks or know what direction to go you use a MAP to find your way. Story mapping is a way to map the features that make up your application. Think of it as a topographic map of your application. It gives you the ability to see how the backlog become the application and how the application is broken up into a backlog. This gives you a powerful decision making tool. With it you can get the highest priority features to production and make your product marketable sooner. Discover gaps in the feature requests. Reduce redundancy before it make it to the dev team. Discover the darker areas that are high risk and expensive coordination cost between departments or components. Find the known/unknowns and get an idea of where the unknown/unknown may be waiting for you.
This is a presentation and workshop to help explain what Story Mapping is and how to use it for developing a project. This repository is separated in to 2 branches (see below).
- master - Excersies for practicing story mapping
- gh-page - A presentation about story mapping. What it is. How to pull it off and my experiences with mapping