The new user story backlog is a map. Why the flat user story backlog doesn’t work, and how to build a better backlog that will help you more effectively explain your system, prioritize, and plan your releases. This is Gary. Gary and I worked together for a day to build a user story map - a better version of a product backlog. Building a user story map helps us focus on the big picture - the product as a whole instead of getting myopically focused on an individual story.
When it comes time to prioritize, Gary did so with the entire context of the system in view. In Gary's case he originally set out to build Mimi - short for Music Industry Marketing Interface. However, when it came time to prioritize we focused on the band member promoting a gig in a club. Mimi shipped after a lot of sweat and effort from Gary, Dave Hoover, and the fine folks at Obtiva.
Flat backlogs don't work for me One of the more troubling things, for me, about common Agile development practice is the idea of the flat user story backlog. Build a story map. Story Mapping and/vs Process Maps. One of the key philosophies of Agile software development is to have information radiators visible on the wall so that the progress of the team as well as what team currently is working on gets clearly visible to anybody who visits to the team area.
That includes stakeholders, project managers, team or anybody from the organisation. However, haven’t you observed that many times, as you look at the card-wall (Scrum Board), things are not very clear to you. Card wall may look like the mesh of user-stories with statuses in To Do, In Progress or Done. However some of the bigger questions are not clearly answered by just looking at user-stories. For instance: What part of business process, team is working on in the current iteration? How about having a pictorial view of whole business flow as a process-map, identifying the user-stories (work to be done) in it? If you take a closer look, you will find that some of the user-stories like story 2 are common to multiple business flows. Hello there! Agile Modeling (AM) Home Page: Effective Practices for Modeling and Documentation.
Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Agile Scout | Agile Software Development News.
Scrum. Your Family, Agile, and You. Becoming an Agile Family | One family's attempts at taking control of their chaotic lives. User Story.