2016 Update: Forget about my attempt below and try this user story mapping add-on for JIRA:
I received a great question from a customer today regarding user story mapping:
Quick q, are there any plans / thoughts on adding a higher level board for User Story Mapping ( vs. releases etc ) based on Jeff Patton’s work / ideas. We are struggling to communicate at a higher level epics vs stories vs projects vs priorities and after giving this a try ( manually using cards ) it appears to be really powerful.
The customer goes on to share that they are looking at using Easy Agile User Story Map for JIRA, an add-on for JIRA and GreenHopper. I wasn’t aware of this add-on previously so it was cool that the customer brought it to my attention.
The GreenHopper team has looked at user story mapping a few times over the past three years. We create a story map whenever we tackle a big piece of new functionality –
epics, or release planning, for example.
What struck us every time we explored adding this to GreenHopper was that creating the user story map is:
- something you do at the start of a new project/epic, rather than an on-going task
- very collaborative with the whole team getting involved, walking around, creating paper prototypes and so on
For these reasons we have stuck to physical cards and avoided the projector during a user story mapping session. However, now that we know about the
Easy Agile User Story Maps JIRA add-on we’ll be sure to take a look and see if we can retain the collaborative nature of these meetings.
Have you tried it?
Tweet me and let me know.
