User Story Mapping & Value Slicing
Create lightweight release plans by slicing value out of collections of features
目录
What is it?
User Story Mapping is an evolution of the traditional Agile backlog, made popular by Jeff Patton in 20081. It’s an effective practice for creating lightweight release plans that can drive standard Agile delivery practices. At the end of user story mapping, you should have:
- A backlog of scope items (captured as stories or simply feature titles) the team believes can be delivered in the planning window. This means some items will be placed out of scope
- The backlog “sliced” into ~3 iterations, such that it forms the outline of plan
- Enough detail in the first iteration of the plan to get started with the work
Why use User Story Mapping?
- No one likes estimating work effort, but it’s an important step in many environments. User Story Mapping presents an approach to estimation that many teams find much more tolerable than practices like planning poker or t-shirt sizing
- Many projects have a natural progression of work from beginning, middle to end. This progression is often lost in a traditional flat backlog. User Story Mapping captures this information with a lightweight mechanism to plan out more than one iteration (i.e. an Agile release plan)
- User Story Mapping presents backlog items in the context of the overall business process so you don’t lose sight of “the big picture”, a common pitfall in Scrum projects
Related Practices
- User Story Mapping is a great way to create an Agile delivery plan for a business process designed with Event Storming
- Program Increment Planning2 in Scaled Agile Framework leverages many of the ideas behind User Story Mapping
- Site Mapping3 should provide the backbone of the User Story Map in UI driven projects
Who do you need?
- Facilitator (if the team is new to the approach)
- Product Owner
- User Experience Design
- Analysts
- Developers
- Testers
Suggested Time
- ~4 Hours not including breaks
- Facilitate in small sessions @ around ~90 minutes each
- Session can be done on different days
Difficulty
- Facilitator: Easy
- Participants: Easy
Facilitation Materials Needed
- Drawing paper roll4. Stickies tend to fall off walls otherwise.
- 3 different colors of wide format sticky notes like the 4x6 sticky notes5
- 2 different colors of small square sticky notes like the 3x3 sticky notes6
- Markers
Want to run this practice remotely? Here’s some help to jump start your session 💻🙏