A user story map is a technique created by Jeff Patton where you arranges you user stories into a useful model to help understand the functionality of the system. In this blog post, Steve Rogalsky explains how to create a user story map.
he starts by presenting the main benefits of the user story maps, like seeing the big picture of your backlog and providing a better tool for making decisions about grooming and prioritizing of the backlog. Then he gives a eight point detailed process to create the story map:
1. Form a group of 3-5 people who understand the purpose of the product.
2. Gather the major user tasks of the project/application in silence on post-its.
3. Next ask the team to group the post-its in silence.
4. Using another colour of post-it, name each group and put the post-it on top of the group.
5. Arrange the groups left to right in the order a user would typically complete the tasks.
6. Make sure you haven’t missed any major user tasks or activities.
7. With a finished framework for the map, you can add more detailed user stories below each user task before breaking your map into releases.
8. Finally, take all the user stories in the first release and do some serious user story slicing to make sure we have sliced the first release as thin as possible.
An example allows to understand how this is implemented in practice.
