User Story Mapping at XP 2008

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.