ThoughtWorks
  • 联系我们
  • Español
  • Português
  • Deutsch
  • English
概况
  • 工匠精神和科技思维

    采用现代的软件开发方法,更快地交付价值

    智能驱动的决策机制

    利用数据资产解锁新价值来源

  • 低摩擦的运营模式

    提升组织的变革响应力

    企业级平台战略

    创建与经营战略发展同步的灵活的技术平台

  • 客户洞察和数字化产品能力

    快速设计、交付及演进优质产品和卓越体验

    合作伙伴

    利用我们可靠的合作商网络来扩大我们为客户提供的成果

概况
  • 汽车企业
  • 清洁技术,能源与公用事业
  • 金融和保险企业
  • 医疗企业
  • 媒体和出版业
  • 非盈利性组织
  • 公共服务机构
  • 零售业和电商
  • 旅游业和运输业
概况

特色

  • 技术

    深入探索企业技术与卓越工程管理

  • 商业

    及时了解数字领导者的最新业务和行业见解

  • 文化

    分享职业发展心得,以及我们对社会公正和包容性的见解

数字出版物和工具

  • 技术雷达

    对前沿技术提供意见和指引

  • 视野

    服务数字读者的出版物

  • 数字化流畅度模型

    可以将应对不确定性所需的数字能力进行优先级划分的模型

  • 解码器

    业务主管的A-Z技术指南

所有洞见

  • 文章

    助力商业的专业洞见

  • 博客

    ThoughtWorks 全球员工的洞见及观点

  • 书籍

    浏览更多我们的书籍

  • 播客

    分析商业和技术最新趋势的精彩对话

概况
  • 申请流程

    面试准备

  • 毕业生和变换职业者

    正确开启技术生涯

  • 搜索工作

    在您所在的区域寻找正在招聘的岗位

  • 保持联系

    订阅我们的月度新闻简报

概况
  • 会议与活动
  • 多元与包容
  • 新闻
  • 开源
  • 领导层
  • 社会影响力
  • Español
  • Português
  • Deutsch
  • English
ThoughtWorks菜单
  • 关闭   ✕
  • 产品及服务
  • 合作伙伴
  • 洞见
  • 加入我们
  • 关于我们
  • 联系我们
  • 返回
  • 关闭   ✕
  • 概况
  • 工匠精神和科技思维

    采用现代的软件开发方法,更快地交付价值

  • 客户洞察和数字化产品能力

    快速设计、交付及演进优质产品和卓越体验

  • 低摩擦的运营模式

    提升组织的变革响应力

  • 智能驱动的决策机制

    利用数据资产解锁新价值来源

  • 合作伙伴

    利用我们可靠的合作商网络来扩大我们为客户提供的成果

  • 企业级平台战略

    创建与经营战略发展同步的灵活的技术平台

  • 返回
  • 关闭   ✕
  • 概况
  • 汽车企业
  • 清洁技术,能源与公用事业
  • 金融和保险企业
  • 医疗企业
  • 媒体和出版业
  • 非盈利性组织
  • 公共服务机构
  • 零售业和电商
  • 旅游业和运输业
  • 返回
  • 关闭   ✕
  • 概况
  • 特色

  • 技术

    深入探索企业技术与卓越工程管理

  • 商业

    及时了解数字领导者的最新业务和行业见解

  • 文化

    分享职业发展心得,以及我们对社会公正和包容性的见解

  • 数字出版物和工具

  • 技术雷达

    对前沿技术提供意见和指引

  • 视野

    服务数字读者的出版物

  • 数字化流畅度模型

    可以将应对不确定性所需的数字能力进行优先级划分的模型

  • 解码器

    业务主管的A-Z技术指南

  • 所有洞见

  • 文章

    助力商业的专业洞见

  • 博客

    ThoughtWorks 全球员工的洞见及观点

  • 书籍

    浏览更多我们的书籍

  • 播客

    分析商业和技术最新趋势的精彩对话

  • 返回
  • 关闭   ✕
  • 概况
  • 申请流程

    面试准备

  • 毕业生和变换职业者

    正确开启技术生涯

  • 搜索工作

    在您所在的区域寻找正在招聘的岗位

  • 保持联系

    订阅我们的月度新闻简报

  • 返回
  • 关闭   ✕
  • 概况
  • 会议与活动
  • 多元与包容
  • 新闻
  • 开源
  • 领导层
  • 社会影响力
博客
选择主题
查看所有话题关闭
技术 
敏捷项目管理 云 持续交付 数据科学与工程 捍卫网络自由 演进式架构 体验设计 物联网 语言、工具与框架 遗留资产现代化 Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence 微服务 平台 安全 软件测试 技术策略 
商业 
金融服务 全球医疗 创新 零售行业 转型 
招聘 
职业心得 多元与融合 社会改变 
博客

话题

选择主题
  • 技术
    技术
  • 技术 概观
  • 敏捷项目管理
  • 云
  • 持续交付
  • 数据科学与工程
  • 捍卫网络自由
  • 演进式架构
  • 体验设计
  • 物联网
  • 语言、工具与框架
  • 遗留资产现代化
  • Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence
  • 微服务
  • 平台
  • 安全
  • 软件测试
  • 技术策略
  • 商业
    商业
  • 商业 概观
  • 金融服务
  • 全球医疗
  • 创新
  • 零售行业
  • 转型
  • 招聘
    招聘
  • 招聘 概观
  • 职业心得
  • 多元与融合
  • 社会改变
敏捷项目管理Pune技术

Story Mapping, Visual Way of Building Product Backlog

Sunit Parekh Sunit Parekh

Published: Jan 12, 2015

One of the key objectives of a project inception is to collect requirements collaboratively. But, many times, it is difficult to decide where to start and what to focus on. Story mapping is an engaging activity where all participants are involved in the process of building the product backlog on a wall, versus writing a dull 100-page requirement document. 

Story mapping was invented by Jeff Patton and introduced to me by Chirag Doshi and I find it very effective and useful tool to capture requirements during inception.

Building a story map

Story mapping is a top-down approach of requirement gathering and is represented as a tree. Story mapping starts from an overarching vision. A vision is achieved via goals. Goals are reached by completing activities. And to complete an activity, users needs to perform tasks. And these tasks can be transformed into user stories for software development.

Story Map Structure: Goals > Activities > Tasks > Stories

Lets take an example of an online store application’s one of the goal ‘Find product’ and build a branch of a story map to understand it better,

To achieve goal ‘Find product’ there are multiple ways such as ‘Browse through product category tree’, ‘Free text search’, ‘Promoted products’. Lets take one approach  ‘Browse through product category tree’ to build our story map,

now to complete activity of reaching a required product, user needs to do perform certain tasks,

now this tasks can be converted to user stories for software development,

like this continue to deep dive each branch of the story map starting from goals and build the whole story map. In my experience building full story map takes from 3 days to 2 weeks based on project size and complexity. 

For your reference, here is a sample branch of story map from real project,

and full story map after 5 days of activities looked like following,

Now we learned how to build story map, lets look at the advantages of it.

Advantages of story mapping

  1. Visual presentation of the product backlog (big picture) brings all the stakeholders on same page, in terms of  scope and complexity. It also indirectly provides a view of project size.
  2. Requirements captured in a physical format fosters collaboration and builds shared understanding.
  3. Since inception is usually a time boxed activity, the story map approach helps to deep dive and focus on important features of the application. Marking ‘nice to have’ features as ‘out of scope’ during deep dive sessions, helps the team save time.
  4. Interestingly, having all stories laid out on the wall assists the team to perform relative sizing of the stories quickly.
  5. Story map structure helps with prioritisation and allows for easy slicing of the backlog into releases and carve out MVP. Slicing can be done vertically or horizontally, such as few features or more features with MVP in each feature.
  6. Story map can be transformed to agile project management tools like Mingle as product backlog.

Enrich story map with more information

Sometime we need more information to be captured with story map e.g. nice to have stories, follow up questions, alternative approaches... This is like enriching the story map with more information. Following are few of the use cases of same,

  1. Use different colors to represent different levels in story map e.g. Orange for Goals, Blue for Features, Green for Epics and Yellow for Stories.
  2. Put wireframe next to the relevant area of story map.
  3. Use stickers like dots or stars to represent special notations:
    • Marking out of scope features are important for shared understanding
    • Identifying alternatives help to capture rich user experience and low cost alternative solutions
  4. Use small sticky to capture notes, assumption, follow-ups or questions

 

Alternative ways of structuring story map

In story mapping, defining a structure is important and then refine it as needed. The objective is to start with some structure in mind and evolve from it. Sometime it takes 2-3 iteration to get the structure right. 

One alternative structure is based on ‘User Journeys’. User driven approach helps to identify requirements from user perspective e.g. buyer, seller, administrator etc. The map is then structured as User > Goals > User Journeys > Actions > Stories. 

Another alternative, especially useful for NFRs (non-functional requirements) can use:
 NFR > Requirement > Story.

Large projects may require up to 6 levels in a story map. However for smaller projects,  3 levels are usually sufficient.

Preparing for story mapping exercise

Now that you are convinced about using story map for your next gig, lets look at what you need to get ready for the activity:

  1. A large Conference room with empty wall space for full duration of inception. 
  2. Different color stickers, one for each level. 
  3. Thick marker pens (1.5mm thick permanent marker) 10+ nos - to read stickies from far.
  4. Stickers (dots or stars) - to enrich story map with more information.
  5. Use magic charts/whiteboard in case walls are not a good surface for stickies.
  6. A good camera to take photos of the wall.

 

Learnings

While doing story mapping I ran into challenges and found ways to overcome those. Following are tips to avoid those traps and help you run the story mapping successfully. 

  1. Story mapping is a discovery phase for products requirements, follow principal of capturing everything with alternatives to avoid long running discussions. 
  2. Prioritise deep dives frequently to avoid spending time on less relevant topics.
  3. Tidy up and rearrange stickies frequently before it grows big and becomes very difficult to manage. Keep good walking space near walls. e.g. NFR story map wall photo shown above :-)
  4. While working with stickies, remember to remove stickies carefully to avoid folds, so it stays on the wall for the whole duration of the activity, and is readable in photographs.

Conclusion

Story mapping is an effective inception tool to create a product backlog in a visually structured way. It helps in building a shared understanding, identify gaps in the backlog, see interdependencies, perform better relative sizing. Further, it can also help in slicing and release planning activities.

References

  • Book User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton
  • Read more on capturing non-functional requirements using story map

Many thanks to Gurpreet for review and valuable feedback.

If you have tried story mapping on your project, please share your learnings, thoughts, photos using comments.

相关博客
敏捷项目管理

Road-mapping Your Way to Agile Fluency

Kelsey van Haaster
了解更多
体验设计

Adjusting to the Agile UX Workflow

Ben Melbourne
了解更多
敏捷项目管理

The Road from an Agile Practitioner to an Agile Coach

Aman King
了解更多
  • 产品及服务
  • 合作伙伴
  • 洞见
  • 加入我们
  • 关于我们
  • 联系我们

WeChat

×
QR code to ThoughtWorks China WeChat subscription account

媒体与第三方机构垂询 | 政策声明 | Modern Slavery statement ThoughtWorks| 辅助功能 | © 2021 ThoughtWorks, Inc.