One of the toughest challenges in DevOps or Digitial Transformations is sharing the vision and helping stakeholders to feel progress.

Story mapping is a planning technique that can help show the full vision of the project being worked on. It helps all involved keep their eye on the end goals, while breaking up work into deliverable “slices”. Each “slice” helps show the end to end story, keeping the feeling of progress while adding capability.

One challenge I’ve found across organizations who attempt to adopt DevOps is the difficulty in having everyone aligned on a shared goal. Story mapping also helps in identifying tasks that advance the broader story, so those involved don’t find themselves saying, “we’ve been working on this for a year and what have we accomplished?”.

Why would this talk be a good fit for the DevOpsDays audience?

Since “DevOps” as a term is so overloaded, everyone has a different idea of what it means and everyone has a different idea of what needs to happen first.

Using a technique like story mapping provides a visible artifact which can help create that alignment (or at least awareness).

I’m a Developer Advocate at Microsoft. Previously, I was a Principal Engineer at Chef.

Before that, I was a Site Reliability Engineer at Stack Overflow. I’m active in the Chef,