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John Stenbeck, in his book “PMI-ACP and Certified Scrum Pr0fessional Exam Prep and Desk Reference” has set forth an Agile Project Management Processes Grid.

Today I’m doing a post on the process 2.6 Decomposition, which breaks down features into small items called user stories.   Process 2.7 Progressive Elaboration is a process which users story maps to arrange the user stories in a way that aligns with the goals of a market and development plan, and simultaneously organizes the user stories accordingly to their complexity.

The first purpose of a story map is to identify the highest priority features for development.   Stories are arranged vertically according to their importance, and so the stories at the top of each column are the ones that are destined for release first.

So the user stories that make up the first release are then grouped together, followed by the ones that make up the second release, and so on.   They are divided by natural fracture lines, which occur where a potentially shippable product becomes an actual shippable product, or release.

The second purpose of a story map is to help determine how fast the solution development can be expected to progress and to set a baseline schedule.   Stories are arranged horizontally according to the size of the user story, from smallest to the largest.

Once the user stories are grouped together by natural fracture lines into those that belong to release #1, release #2, and so forth, then the total number of user stories in each release can be summed up.   Then, with an estimate of the team velocity (the amount of user stories that can be reliably completed in an iteration), the number of iterations required for each release can be calculated.

The next process is in the Adaptive Planning knowledge area, and it is the tool of 3.5 User Stories.

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