User Story Mapping Guide

We'll be generating user stories as a way to break down and understand further how CFIA transporters may interact with our application. We make user story maps (USMs) so we can we design the application interface against the sequence of actions transporters do: recording animals in transport, feeding, watering, and resting animals, what they do in a contingency situation, other foreseen situations, etc.

See related tasks in the User Story Map Documentation milestone.

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This page is written assuming that StoriesOnBoard is used for USM.

Our USM represents a decision tree of events, and stories should not describe looping events or cause a loop of events.

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Epics Template (Blue cards at the top of the board):

Epics should be ordered in a time-wise fashion, left-most Epics on the board should occur before right-most Epics in time.

Epics describe a particular point in the sequence of events of animal transport. Epics are written as follows:

1. Title of Epic. The name of the particular transportation form being filled out.
2. Assumptions up to point of documentation. For example, assume a "perfect run" of animal transportation up until the particular form is to be filled out, or assume a partially good run, or assume a really bad run. Maybe the form is never filled out due to some situation.
3. Directions for following step cards. Write a description of what the following step cards encapsulate. For example, if the step cards should describe the situation that different user stories branch off from.

Steps Template (Yellow cards that follow from the Epic cards):

Steps are unordered in an or-wise fashion (not time-wise), Steps under an Epic are mutually exclusive with other Steps for the same Epic.

Steps usually describe what the user does next in the sequence of events. For example, if an epic was to "visit the main page of website" then a step would be "read the blog posts". For our purposes, the step cards describe a situation that may break off into stories for the Epic. Steps are written as follows:

1. Title of Step. The situation that generate a variety of stories for the epic. For example, if the Epic was "transfer of care" a situation would be "an animal was injured on offload/delivery".
2. Description of Step. A further description of the situation, if needed.

Story Template (White cards that follow from the Step cards):

Stories are unordered in an or-wise fashion (not time-wise), Stories under a Step are mutually exclusive with other Stories for the same Step.

Stories describe the direct actions the user takes from the Step above. Further from the Step example, if an epic was to "visit the main page of website", then a step would be "read the blog posts", and a story could be "but the blog posts don't load, so the user reports the buggy blog using a report link on the webpage that does load". Stories are written as follows:

1. Title of Story. A single-sentence description that follows from the related Step card and sets the theme for the story (or stories) contained in the card.
2. Stories. A few sentences that describe the actions the transporter (or other party) takes given the situation and theme for the card.