From the course: Agile Requirements Foundations

User story maps

From the course: Agile Requirements Foundations

User story maps

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- A user's story map is a powerful visual that helps the entire team see the forest through the trees by organizing user's stories in a visual format. A story map is all about telling the whole story versus a small part of it. It's a technique that keeps the team focused on the user experience and results in better dialogue in conversation. To create a user story map, we take all of the user stories for a product release and place them in the sequence of how a customer uses the product, from left to right. The vertical columns of a story map provide the details under the higher level story or theme. For example, in our payments feature, the first set of stories on the left would be about the user profile, browsing, and filling the cart. Then, a logical sequence of actions a user may take would follow to the right, like checking out. Now don't get caught up in finding the perfect order for the features in user stories. Sometimes there just isn't an order and it's more important to have the big picture visual than a perfect story order. Going from top to bottom, we get more details by chunking out the top level. So, for example, creating a profile at the top level may break down below the story map as creating a username and password, entering basic profile information, entering stored payment and shipping information, attaching a gift card to my account. Story mapping is a great technique to use as a team in a workshop to help everyone see how all of the stories relate. The team can then discuss which grouping makes up the minimum viable product. Story mapping also helps the team identify holes in the storyline of a customer and find gaps in scope that may be missing. There are almost always too many user stories. Story mapping creates a visual that helps the product owner, business analyst and team, find what fits and ultimately which stories should be thrown out. By telling the overall story of how a user interacts with a product, story mapping ensures the team doesn't lose sight of the big picture when working on each individual story.

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