Story Mapping for Releases

To help understand realistic timelines for releasing or how many Lean|Agile Teams you need to meet a specific release date, Story Mapping is a successful Agile technique to accomplish this. Each release can be viewed as an “MVP” – Minimum Viable Product. In other words, it’s the most valuable, high priority feature set and defect fixes for the next release, and to gain maximum learning through feedback from stakeholders.

In Story mapping, the Product Manager or Product Owner has an initial Backlog of Epics, Features, and high-level stories. For successful Story Mapping, we recommend to break the meetings down into multiple smaller steps with focused working groups. Here are the steps we recommend:

• A working session with the Product Owner and Business Analysts to prioritize and layout the Epics and Features.
• Another working session between the Product Owner and Business Analysts to create the high-level stories for the Features.
• A working session with the Dev and Test Leads to get T-shirt sizing on the high-level stories.

After you do the above 3 steps, the Team should then have an understanding to the initial size of the backlog, and will be ready to move into the Story Mapping workshop.