Story Telling with Story Mapping
Blog: Agile Adoption Roadmap
- It moves away from thinking of functionality first and toward the customer experience first.
- It provides the big picture and end-to-end view of the work ahead
- It’s a decomposition tool from idea to multiple user stories.
- It asks the team to identify the highest value work from a customer perspective and where you may want the most customer feedback.
- It advocates cutting only one increment of work at a time instead realizing that feedback from the current increment will help shape subsequent increments.
Getting started with Story Mapping
- Create the “backbone” of the story map. These are the big tasks that the users engage with. Capture the end-to-end customer experience. Start by asking “what do users do?” You may use a quiet brainstorming approach to get a number of thoughts on the wall quickly
- Then start adding steps that happen within each backbone.
- From there explore activities or options within each step. Ask, what are the specific things a customer would do here? Are there alternative things they could do? These activities may be epics and even user stories.
- Create the “walking skeleton”. This is where you slice a set of activities or options that can give you the minimum end-to end value of customer experience. Only cut enough work that can be completed within one to three sprints that represents customer value.
As you view the wall, the horizontal access defines the flow of which you place the backbone and steps. The vertical access under each contains the activities or options represented by epics and user stories for that particular area. Use short verb/noun phrases to capture the backbones, steps, and activities (e.g. capture my address, view my order status, receive invoice).
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