Tools For Agile Blog

We recently announced Silver Stories, a tool for agile portfolio management. In this post, I explain some of the problems that we hope to solve with Silver Stories. Click here for the entire series of posts on Silver Stories.

About User Story Mapping

User Story Mapping is a technique popularized by Jeff Patton that allows teams to build up a set of user stories by looking at the software from a user centric point of view. You could say that Story Maps are a combination of user centric design and feature breakdown trees. User Story Mapping is a powerful way to gain an understanding of scope for new product development.

The feature breakdown in user story maps is User Activity -> User Task -> User Story

User Activities are things that users do towards achieving a particular goal. For example, “Create a profile” might be one activity in a social networking website.

User Tasks are specific steps within an activity. Tasks by themselves do not move towards a goal, but are required components of an activity. For example, “Add contact information”, “Add education experience”, “Add hobbies and interests” might all be user tasks under the “Create a profile” activity.

User Stories are small end-to-end vertical slices of functionality that implement User Tasks. For instance, the “Add contact information” task could be broken into stories to “Add contact information”, “Edit contact information”, “Validate email address”, “Create a % complete progress bar” and so on.

Story mapping is a fluid, collaborative effort. Multiple stakeholders can participate on different sections of the map until a single shared understanding of the system is created. Cards are dynamically moved around, changing the order of the activities, grouping cards together under an activity or breaking cards down into tasks and stories.

Once created, the story map provides a good high level picture of the software to be built, along with a flow of activities from the user’s perspective.

User Story Mapping with Silver Stories

Silver Stories has a unique story tree view that allows stakeholders to easily create story maps. Here is a story map created using Silver Stories:

The story tree is visualized using a 2-dimension mapping of cards. This visualization enables you to see the entire tree at all levels of hierarchy on the screen at one time, eliminating the need to drill down through the hierarchy. The problem with drill downs is that you are always looking at sub sections of the system, losing the context in which it is placed. This visualization allows you to see user activities, user tasks and user stories within context.

Cards in yellow represent User Activities, cards in red are User Tasks and cards in blue are User Stories.

The shape of the story map gives an indication about which sections of the software contain the highest density of functionality.

Thus, the visualization of user story maps in Silver Catalyst use patterns, shapes and colors to convey much more information than can be obtained using a tabular form or a tree drill down.

Resources

This post only touches on user story mapping from a visualization point of view. For more on how you can use story mapping to collaborate with multiple stakeholders and create a shared understanding of the product, check out Jeff Pattons resource page on User Story mapping.

Related posts:

1. Silver Stories in Action: Story Trees
2. Is the concept of the user story dead?
3. Improved Integration Flow in Silver Stories
4. Team Agility To Business Agility – Silver Stories Open To Public
5. Setting user capacity limits in Silver Catalyst