Follow-up on Story Mapping: Sprint 2 Planning

My team had our Sprint 2 Planning meeting yesterday, and I started with the story map on the wall that I wrote about over the weekend. Most of the questions the team members had were covered in the conditions of satisfaction that I had written on the note card version of the stories. The team decided to migrate two stories below the cut point, pushing them to Sprint 3 instead. The first of these was the external authentic testing of the software system: since the team was committing to making a high-fidelity paper prototype, they were rightly wary of also trying to budget the time for authentic testing. Since we would focus on a paper prototype, we also pushed down the task of making a design guide to specify fonts, colors, and so on. This was also a prudent move, since if the paper prototype evaluation went poorly, we would need the time to clean that up before investing time in a design guide that would likely have to be done again.

Much of this conversation went as I predicted, but the task planning ended up with some interesting results. Several new stories were added to our map, most of them planned for the next iteration.

These new stories dealt primarily with user interactions that we could foresee only after talking through the extant map and considering the bounds of the stories we had committed to. The new stories include:

• Continue uninterrupted if the page is reloaded
• Install the game as an app (manifest.json)
• Continue after pressing the browser's back button
• Browse previously unlocked content
• Clear previously unlocked content
• Finish the story for Prairie Creek

That last one is not a user interaction, but simply our team noticing that we had neglected to include a story for the creative work of finishing our narratives! By the end of this sprint, we should have significantly reduced risk around our core game mechanics and theme, but there still will be necessary work in fleshing out the narrative.