Story Mapping
Learn about story mapping, a powerful way to prioritize stories.
We'll cover the following...
- Step 1: Prioritize epics and other top-level functionality
- Step 2: Decompose top-level epics into steps or themes
- Step 3: Decompose each step or theme into prioritized stories
- Story mapping and user roles
- Story mapping as an example of an information radiator
- Story mapping as an example of the Agile pendulum swing
Because product backlogs often consist of dozens or hundreds of stories, it’s easy for priorities to get confused and the collection of items delivered at the end of each sprint to be incoherent even if, individually, they represent the highest-priority backlog items.
Story mapping is a powerful technique for prioritizing the sequence in which stories are delivered while simultaneously shaping the collections of stories into coherent packages (Patton, 2014). It also helps with elicitation, analysis, and specification of requirements, and it becomes an aid to status tracking during development.
Story mapping is conducted with the whole team and consists of three steps:
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Capture major chunks of functionality on sticky notes, and arrange them in a prioritized line from left to right, highest priority to lowest. Major chunks of functionality will consist of features, epics/big stories, themes, initiatives, and other large-grain requirements. I’ll refer to ...