User Story Mapping

Abstract

Is your Agile project buried under a mountain of user stories? As you add stories, does your vision of the product you're building grow more hazy? As story count increases, do business stakeholders become more frustrated with prioritization? Do you find it difficult to communicate a big picture of what your system does?
In Agile Software Development, User Stories are used to describe, schedule and manage the software functionality built by the development team. A good user story describes, from a user's point of view, what they need from the system and why. The more granular the user story is, the moreflexibly we can prioritize, plan, and develop software. But, for a project of any reasonable size, user story count quickly explodes into hundreds of stories making it difficult to prioritize and communicate clearly what the product you're building does.
User Story Mapping engages Agile teams in the creation of a simple to build model that places your user stories in context. With a story map you'll be able to effectively see the big-picture - the breadth of functionality the product you're building implements, the users it serves, and the activities they engage in. You'll easily be able to see how larger planning-grade stories have split into smaller stories suitable for development. You'll be able to visually prioritize stories to create effective incremental release plans. In this half day tutorial you'll learn the essentials of story mapping, story splitting and thinning, and incremental planning using a story map.

Objectives

Participants will understand the characteristics of a good user story and how those characteristics vary when you're writing stories for planning and for development. Participants will learn how to use stories to create a "story map" that gives business stakeholders, developers, and end users a big-picture view of what the entire system does. Participants learn to leverage their story map to more effectively plan incremental releases. split bloated user stories, and all the while communicating a clear picture of what the system can do.

Keywords

Agile software development, user stories, incremental release planning, project management, process and methodology

Target Audience

Skill Level: intermediate - some background in Agile development required
Agile Customers, Product Owners, Business Analysts, User Experience Practitioners, Project Managers, Product Managers, Scrum Masters, Iteration Managers, XP Coaches, and anyone using Agile development but frustrated with the proliferation of user stories on their current project.

Presenter: Jeff Patton

Jeff Patton has designed and developed software for the past 12 years on a wide variety of projects from on-line aircraft parts ordering to electronic medical records. Jeff has focused on Agile approaches since working on an early Extreme Programming team in 2000. In particular Jeff has specialized in the application of user centered design techniques to improve Agile requirements, planning, and products. Some of his recent writing on the subject can be found at www.agileproductdesign.com and Alistair Cockburn's Crystal Clear. His forthcoming book to be released in Addison-Wesley's Agile Development Series gives tactical advise to those seeking to deliver useful, usable, and valuable software.
Jeff's currently a proud employee of ThoughtWorks, founder and list moderator of the agile-usability Yahoo discussion group, a columnist with StickyMinds.com and IEEE Software, and a winner of the Agile Alliance's 2007 Gordon Pask Award.

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