Story Mapping for Agile Release Planning

• Leverage Story Maps to plan the frequent delivery of enhancements that provide real value to the customer.
• Arrange hypothesis-testing before the full product or feature is developed and highlight dependencies and gaps so they can be addressed before becoming impediments.
• Integrate Story Mapping with other techniques for optimal effectiveness, including Lean Startup MVP, Weighted Shorted Job First (WSJF), use-case analysis, and Story-Splitting Patterns.

Join subject-matter expert and author Howard Podeswa to learn how to create and use Story Maps for agile release planning. In this course, you will learn how to facilitate story-mapping workshops and to leverage existing analysis artifacts, such as process models and use-case models, to help build the map. You will learn how to plan quick wins and test hypotheses in the first rows of the Map, and to then use story-splitting patterns to populate the remaining rows and deliver a coherent set of features every sprint. You will also learn to use the Map to highlight and communicate dependencies between stories and workflow gaps (frequent causes of delays, errors, and rework) so they can be addressed before they become problems.

Story Maps are a powerful and effective tool for agile release planning. They help actualize one of the key goals of agile planning: deliver a deployable, working version of value to the customer on a frequent basis (every 1- to 2-week sprint). Many agile organizations struggle with this and become feature factories churning out stories that don’t add up to useful, marketable functionality. Story Mapping addresses this problem in a single graphic by depicting both the sequence in which stories are to be developed and the sequence in which customers use the functionality the stories enable. This combination enables planners to ensure that the stories delivered each sprint add up to meaningful improvements in the customer’s workflow.