User Story Mapping Tool Review – SmartViewApp

User Story Mapping Series

* How to Create a User Story Map
* How to Prioritize a User Story Map
* Tips for Facilitating a User Story Mapping Session
* Don't Etch your User Story Map in Stone
* User Story Mapping Tool Review - SmartViewApp
* Story Maps - A Testing Tool After All

I’ve tried to give consistent advice when people ask me what tools I would recommend for agile teams. In my opinion, the best tools to start with are sharpies, post-its, and retrospectives. With these basic tools, you can create story maps, track your improvements and progress with a kanban board, and build just about any report you need in Excel. For beginner teams and co-located teams, this is often more than enough. However, as you grow, start working with remote team members, or just want more advanced and automated reporting, you might start exploring the tool market.

As a big fan of user story maps, I’ve been on the lookout for ALM tools that include them and occasionally talk to tool vendors to see what their long term plans are regarding story maps. As you can read in the comments in the link above, the options are slowly increasing. In this post I’d like to highlight a new entry into the ALM market that combines both story mapping and kanban in a simple yet effective package.

In order to give this application a good test of its capabilities, I decided to try and create a story map that mimicked the example I created here.  I was able to easily create the map, prioritize the features into releases, set the status of the features using the kanban board, and generate a few metrics. Here are a few screenshots: 

This is a picture of the user story map. At the top of the page you can see the four user activities displayed as envelopes. In this view, the Manage Calendar activity is open. Similar to my original story map that I created in PowerPoint (yes, really…), the map allows you to display the releases (I’ve used colour coding), and the status of each feature (green check mark = done, etc.). Dragging features up or down or between user tasks is simple.

The kanban board mimics functionality you can find in most tools. It allows you to set your own columns, set wip limits, etc, and it gives you some metrics and reports like Cumulative Flow Diagrams. One nice bonus of this tool is that it is already available as an iPad app so that you can carry your kanban board and map with you anywhere.

IPad Version

Web Version

I was able to set this project up as a public project, so if you want to take a look for yourself, click here.  Note – this application is currently only available in ‘modern’ browsers, so you may need to download Chrome or FireFox.

Not only does this tool support two of my favourite agile practices, it is also simple and easy to use. That means you can continue to focus on the important things - “individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. Since the tool is currently in Beta, it also means that it is ready for your input. In fact, some of the changes I’ve suggested have already made it into the product. So, if you think your team is ready to add an ALM tool, check it out here.

P.S. Need another reason to try this out? It calls us “people”, not “resources”. Thanks SmartView!