User Story Mapping

Building an Agile User Story Map in Innoslate

User story mapping offers a compelling visualization of a product's journey from the user's perspective. By utilizing Innoslate's Activity Diagram with its swimlanes, you can create a User Story Map to enhance transparency by clearly defining the roles and responsibilities associated with each process. Utilizing a tool like Innoslate not only allows you to create these user story maps but also enables you to seamlessly reuse tasks for Kanban Boards and Gantt Charts, facilitating effective management of your project timeline and progress. In this guide, we will demonstrate how to create a user story map in Innoslate for a banking application with an activity diagram, and then leverage those tasks within Innoslate's Project Management tools, including Gantt Charts, Kanban Boards, and tying tasks back to the Requirements.

Our focus is on leveraging agile methodologies to transition from Use Case Stories to Kanban Boards and Gantt Charts, enhancing project management while integrating requirements, modeling, and verification and validation processes. Agile emphasizes flexibility, teamwork, and user feedback, allowing teams to adapt quickly and deliver incremental value. Kanban visualizes tasks, limits work in progress and improves workflow efficiency. This approach enables teams to illustrate user journeys and necessary tasks through user story maps. By adopting a data-driven mindset, we can make informed decisions based on performance metrics and user insights. Integrating these agile practices into Innoslate fosters a dynamic environment that adapts to the evolving technical landscape.

To follow along, click here to download the User Story Project .INNO File and import it into a new Innoslate project.

Use Case

Step 1: Define the User Story Map in Innoslate

Access the Diagrams Dashboard and locate the "User Success Story (USS.1) Activity Diagram."  The User Story Map will be represented as an Innoslate Activity Diagram, which features branches created using the Fork/Join (Parallel) Construct and appropriately applied Swimlane constructs for each designated branch.

For our banking application, the User Story Map is organized into the following swimlanes:

User Persona: This lane focuses on current Bank Account Holders, highlighting the importance of understanding their banking habits, financial goals, and concerns. Usually, other projects will have Names or other important stakeholders.

User Activities: This lane outlines the anticipated actions users will take within the banking application, such as installing the app on their mobile devices, executing transactions, and accessing supplementary information. Our focus here is on understanding user goals and the value they derive from the application, rather than just cataloging features. This approach ensures that our development efforts align with the users' primary financial needs and challenges. In some projects, this lane may be referred to as an Epic, and its specific content may evolve as the project progresses.

User Tasks: This lane outlines the specific actions users perform within the software, ensuring that features align with user needs and practical implementation. This step initiates the prioritization of your tasks by version release.

User Stories Release 1: This lane encompasses the tasks earmarked for the first release version of the application.

Release 2: This lane outlines the tasks designated for the second release version.

Release 3: This lane details the tasks planned for the third release version.

Step 2: Add Tasks

With the user story map established, the next step is to illustrate the activities and tasks by simply dragging and dropping task constructs onto the branches of the Activity Diagram. By choosing the Task class for each entity on the left sidebar, you effectively prepare the Task for integration with Kanban Boards and Gantt Charts in other views within Innoslate. Additionally, when you assign a Task to a specific branch from the Activity Diagram, it will automatically establish a relationship with the Swimlane indicating the Performer of the Task.

Map Tasks to Branches:

Place the relevant tasks on the appropriate branch that is already aligned with the appropriate swim lane. For example, the User Activities Swimlane has tasks related to the User's needs for the App. For example:

• • • The User manages transactions.
    • The User downloads the app.
    • The User finds additional info.

Step 3: Reuse Tasks in Gantt Charts and Kanban Boards

One of the key benefits of using Innoslate is its robust data-driven framework. This framework facilitates the seamless linking of entities across various features, making the integration of agile methodologies straightforward in any work environment. After completing a user story map, you can easily reuse the same Task entities within the Project Management Dashboard. This allows for effectively visualizing these tasks in Gantt charts and Kanban boards, enhancing your project management capabilities.

Generate a Gantt Chart:

Go to the Charts Dashboard of Innoslate and open the 1 Banking App Version 1 Gantt Chart.

Since your tasks and activities have already been established as entities, you can easily incorporate them into the Gantt chart by adding them in as existing entities. If you haven't done so yet at this point, it'll be imperative to add key attributes such as assigned dates, assignees, start and end dates, and durations, and add dependencies as needed. This setup enables your team to visualize the timeline for each task with the overall project plan in the Gantt Chart format.

Use Kanban Boards for Task Progress: 

Go to the Charts Dashboard of Innoslate and open the USS.1 User Success Story Kanban Board and the KBV.2 Banking App Version 2. You can establish Kanban Boards for each version or specific user story map within your project, allowing for improved clarity and organization of tasks associated with the application. We also recommend using labels to improve filtering options across different views, making your querying process more efficient within Innoslate. Labels will also help with utilizing the Calendar on the Project Management Dashboard.

Step 4: Requirements and Traceability

Go to the Charts Dashboard of Innoslate and open the USS.1 Tasks to Requirements Matrix to see the above Matrix. By using Innoslate's Traceability Matrix, you can then easily relate your Tasks to your Requirements, ensuring that every task is aligned with specific project requirements. The Traceability Matrix serves as a powerful tool to visualize and track the relationships between your user stories, tasks, and the corresponding requirements. This means that for each task created in your user story map, you can establish a clear linkage to its requirements, facilitating a better understanding of how each task contributes to the overall project objectives.

Additionally, the ability to trace progress from requirements down to individual tasks promotes accountability within the team. Each team member can see how their work aligns with the broader goals of the project, fostering a sense of ownership and responsibility. This comprehensive approach not only enhances the quality of the final product but also supports effective verification and validation processes, as you can easily demonstrate that all tasks fulfill the necessary requirements. Feel free to navigate to the Documents Dashboard to see the Bank App Requirements Document we are tracing the User Story to.

Step 5: Iteration and Collaboration

Innoslate’s collaboration features facilitate efficient teamwork on projects. Users can provide comments directly on tasks or activities, assign specific roles, and establish links between tasks and their related requirements. As your project progresses, the data-driven approach enables seamless updates to your user story map, requirements, and project management tools, ensuring that all information remains current and relevant.

Key Benefits of Creating User Stories in Innoslate:

• Consistency: Tasks defined in your user story map are automatically available in the Gantt chart and Kanban board, ensuring consistent data across all views.
• Traceability: Tasks can be traced from Requirements to tasks, so there is a clear line of responsibility.
• Data-Driven: Views are built easily from the data.
• Efficiency: Since you’re not duplicating efforts, it’s easier to manage tasks across the entire project lifecycle.