Story Map - techtalk/SpecLog-Resources GitHub Wiki

Story Mapping is a collaborative technique invented and popularised by Jeff Patton. Story maps are intended to foster discussion and collaboration about how to achieve a particular outcome or business impact. This means that story mapping workshops are best held face-to-face, and typically use sticky notes and a physical area (a wall or whiteboard) to build up the map as a team. The sticky notes are arranged both horizontally and vertically: the horizontal arrangement approximates the user's progress through the system, while the vertical arrangement is used to prioritise individual features that allow users to perform activities related to the user story.

By engaging directly with stakeholders, story maps help you get quick and meaningful feedback and adopt an iterative build-measure-learn approach to product development. Directly discussing stories with stakeholders helps identify key features, allowing you to slice and prioritise your product backlog to support the desired flow of user activities at an early stage, and refine it incrementally. As they grow, story maps can become quite large. While the physical environment encourages collaboration and discussion, there are practical limitations of physical story maps: they are tied to a particular location and not suitable for archiving electronically.

SpecLog allows you to capture your physical story maps electronically and integrate them directly with your product backlog in TFS or JIRA, with all the advantages this brings. SpecLog's search functions make it easy to find a particular requirement in a matter of seconds, and you can extend your requirements with acceptance criteria, UI mock-ups and associated Gherkin feature files.

For more information on Story Mapping, see Jeff Patton's site.

SpecLog's pre-defined card templates mimic physical sticky notes and reflect the structure typically used by story maps:

• Deliverable: Produces output to support the desired impact or outcome. This can be a system deliverable or an organisational change.
• User Activity: An activity performed by a user in the context of working towards a specific outcome.
• User Story: System features supporting a specific user activity (user stories, epics, themes, features).

When capturing a physical story map in SpecLog, the following workflow may prove useful:

1. Start by building the backbone of user activities by dragging a user activity to the workspace:
   
2. Place new user stories below the user activity by pressing Ctrl+N:
   
3. Repeat this process with the next user activity by dragging a new new user activity card to the workspace:
   

Groups of users stories on a story map can be sliced for individual iterations or releases. You can define slices in SpecLog in two ways:

1. Place the requirements on separate workspaces (e.g. for a specific sprint). Slices defined using workspaces can be filtered using the workspaces: search tag in the Requirements widget:
   
2. Tag the requirements (e.g. for a specific release or milestone). Slices defined using tags can be filtered using the tags: search tag in the Requirements widget: