Visual user story slicing - O’Reilly video course - my notes
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In an agile environment, how teams slice user stories is crucial for delivering value and creating a continuous flow of product increments. This article explores vertical slicing—a technique that focuses on end-to-end feature delivery rather than splitting work by technical layers.
Vertical vs. Horizontal Slicing: Vertical slicing delivers complete features end-to-end (user interface through database), creating deployable increments of value. In contrast, horizontal slicing divides work by technical layers (front-end, back-end, database), which often requires waiting for all layers to complete before providing user value.
Why Breaking Down Work Matters
From Concept to Cash
The path from idea to revenue requires strategic decomposition:
- Speed of delivery: Release incrementally rather than waiting for complete features
-
Value-driven batching: Break large ideas into smaller, deployable increments
- Large batches resemble waterfall methodology—you cannot deploy value until every component is finished
- Small batches deliver user value faster and enable rapid feedback loops
- User-focused routing: Identify the shortest path to achieve the user’s goal
Maximize Learning Through Small, Valuable Releases
Delivering small batches accelerates learning and reduces risk compared to large, infrequent releases.
Understanding Personas and Goals
From Requirements to User Stories
Traditional approaches (Business Requirements Documents) focus on comprehensive feature lists but often lack user perspective and business context.
User stories emerged from eXtreme Programming and center on who needs something and why, providing better alignment with user needs than traditional requirement documents.
Personas: Representing User Roles
- A persona represents an archetype of a user role (e.g., “Project Manager,” “Developer”)
- Personas guide product vision and inform UX/UI design decisions
- Prioritizing different personas helps teams understand which user groups matter most
Aligning User Value with Business Value
Successful products balance two perspectives:
- User value: Features that users pay for and directly use
- Business value: Features that increase revenue or reduce costs
- When users and customers are different (e.g., B2B software), both perspectives must be considered
- Users interact with the system daily
- Customers make purchase decisions and pay for the system
User Story Mapping
Key Benefits
User story mapping provides:
- Visual requirements: See the complete feature landscape at a glance
- Prioritization and MVP identification: Understand which features create minimum viable product
- Customer focus: Keep stakeholder needs central to discussions
- Shared understanding: Align technical and business teams on scope
- Implementation clarity: Provide detailed roadmap for delivery phases
Story Mapping as Strategic Batching
Story mapping groups related features into logical batches, similar to how PayPal phases feature releases. This prevents the “big bang” delivery problem.
Mapping Personas to Stories
Mapping user stories to personas helps teams:
- Understand which user group each story serves
- Prioritize stories by persona importance
- Ensure diverse user needs are addressed during development
The concept of user stories originated with Kent Beck in eXtreme Programming, and this approach has proven effective in practice. (Rodríguez et al., 2019) further validates this user-centric storytelling approach.
Visual Story Slicing Techniques
Story Slicing Overview
Story slicing breaks down user stories into smaller, more manageable pieces. A useful technique is SPIDER, which provides a systematic framework for decomposition.
Two-Phase Slicing Approach
Phase 1: User-Centric Analysis
- Conduct event mapping to understand user workflows
- Frame discussions from the user’s perspective
- Focus on high-level goals rather than implementation details
- Identify the core user objective
Phase 2: Implementation Details
- Define detailed acceptance criteria
- Create low-fidelity mockups
- Stub out critical functionality to identify dependencies
- Establish clear requirements for development
References
- Rodríguez, P., Mäntylä, M., Oivo, M., Lwakatare, L. E., Seppänen, P., & Kuvaja, P. (2019). Chapter Four - Advances in Using Agile and Lean Processes for Software Development (A. M. Memon, Ed.; Vol. 113, pp. 135–224). Elsevier. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.adcom.2018.03.014