User Story Mapping

Foreword by Martin Fowler

Martin Fowler

June 18, 2014

One of the beneficial consequences of the rise of Agile software development is the notion of splitting up large sets of requirements into smaller chunks. These chunks—stories—enable much more visibility into the progress of a development project. When a product is built story-by-story, with each story’s implementation fully integrated into the software product, everyone can see the product grow. By using stories that make sense to users, developers can steer the project by determining which stories to build next. This greater visibility helps encourage greater participation from users—no longer do they have to wait a year or more to see what the development team’s been up to.

But this chunking has some negative consequences. One of these is that it’s easy to lose the big picture of what a software system should do. You can end up with a jumble of pieces that don’t fit into a coherent whole. Or you can end up building a system that isn’t really helpful to the users, because you’ve missed the essence of what’s needed by getting lost in the details.

Story mapping is a technique that provides the big picture that a pile of stories so often misses.

That’s it, really—the description of this book in a single sentence. And that sentence carries with it the promise of a lot of value. A big picture helps communicate effectively with users, it helps everyone involved avoid building unnecessary features, and it provides an orientation for a ...