Use in the Classroom

• Describe the Purpose/Problem Definition
  • General Overview: the teacher should start by explaining by the problems that USM solves. In the talk Essentials of Agile User Story Mapping at Twitter John Walpole gives an anecdote of what happened at Twitter when there was a poor understanding of what to build, and how USM would have been prevented. The teacher should tell this story or perhaps come up with a different story from their own experience.
  • Classroom Activity: The teacher should ask the students if they have ever experienced a situation where the wrong product was built, or perhaps the students know a situation where this happened in products that they’re using.
• Implement the Tool
  • General Overview: In this step, the tool should be implemented. This means that the students will apply the tool on a specific problem. Specific instructions should be given by the HE teacher for students to proceed with this activity.
  • Classroom Activity: Once the purpose and problem are clearly understood by everyone, we can start implementing the tool. The HE teacher should instruct the students to make groups. Each group should come up with a product they would like to build. Then the groups should apply USM to gain common understanding of the product and its features they want build.
• Collect Data after Tool Implementation
  • General Overview: After implementing, each group should extract the main features that were decided on in their USM session.
  • Classroom Activity: Each group should present their USM to the classroom. Here it is important that both the main features are presented, but also the timeline in which each feature is to be implemented. The students should also state what is the priority of each feature and why was it decided to prioritise certain features?
• Analyse the Data and Reflect on the Outcome
  • General Overview: Once data is collected, it’s important to reflect on the outcomes.
  • Classroom Activity: The teacher should give feedback on each USM. There’s often not a single right approach, so it is important to ask for the motivations between each decision. Together with the rest of the class, improvements should be discussed. To be clear, it is not only teachers that should give feedback. This should be a collaborative process.