Bringing back issues without epics — Easy Agile User Story Maps Version 5

Easy Agile User Story Maps Version 5 is here, and comes with a fresh look and feel, huge performance improvements and, hooray, the issues without Epics panel is back!

With a Development Team 3X the size from when we first launched Easy Agile User Story Maps, it’s safe to say that our story mapping app is almost unrecognisable 2 years on.

We’ve become more sophisticated at capturing our customer’s feedback, asking better discovery questions, digging into product analytics and getting to the bottom of what it is our customers REALLY want to achieve using our story mapping app — and we’ve been constantly iterating towards that!

As the name of our app would suggest, we originally built Easy Agile User Story Maps to help teams run digital and collaborative story mapping sessions alongside their agile boards in Jira. What we’ve discovered has really blown our minds! Yes, our customers are using our app to run story mapping sessions at project inception, plus we’ve seen tremendous growth in the number of customers coming back to the story map every week. 82% of our customers now use the story map at least once a week.

They’ve already run their Story Mapping session, so what are they doing?

We’re hearing from more and more customers that they love the story map for their weekly sprint planning and backlog grooming sessions - a use case that we did not initially expect. And thanks to our customers it is a practice we also now employ at Easy Agile!

Customers have told us the combination of the story map visualisation, paired with how quick and simple it is to create new issues and inline edit existing issues (not having to pop the ‘Edit Issue’ dialogue), makes their backlog grooming sessions frictionless and super fast. And we all know how important a healthy backlog is for effective teams!

Knowing that this is an important part of our customer’s experience with the product, we started asking how we could make this more effective for teams. And here’s what they said;

We found it frustrating that the issues created without “epics” are not displayed in the Story Map view — Tim

It would be super helpful to be able to see user stories that aren’t yet associated with an epic. That way I could create the Epic based on the user stories that don’t have an epic associated with them yet— Brandon

Adding an optional column for stories without epics would be useful to be able to drag those stories into the right epic and we’d like to select multiple cards to drag them around — Richard

Before we look at how we’ve addressed this feedback in version 5 of our app, we think it’s important to give you all a quick history lesson on the evolution of our product.

A Quick History of the Evolution of Easy Agile User Story Maps

Way back in 2016, Tim, Brandon and Richard would have been happy to know Easy Agile User Story Maps actually did show the issues without Epics! See that panel on the right hand side of the screen? So why ditch something our customers wanted?

The problem with this back then, was solely due to performance. Rendering potentially tens of thousands of issues in the right panel of the story map compromised the performance of the story map. We didn’t have a suitable solution to the problem at the time so we decided to bench this feature until we could come up with a solution that would help our customers be more effective, not hinder them.

The next iteration of Easy Agile User Story Maps (4) allowed our customers to ‘Add Existing Issues’ to the story map, which would pop a dialogue box so teams could pull issues not linked to an epic onto the story map, without compromising performance.

This was really just an interim solution though due to the following limitations;

• Inability to search for issues by issue key
• Inability to add multiple issues to the story map at once
• Inability to see issues without epics grouped into sprints or versions

Certainly, there were things we could improve on.

Fast Forward to Easy Agile User Story Maps 5 — Welcome Back Issues Without Epics Panel!

We knew we needed to figure out a better solution to show issues without epics on the story map, a solution that didn’t compromise performance — and we’re thrilled to say that we’ve done that.

Introducing Easy Agile User Story Maps 5!

This release has been in production for our Cloud customers for some time now, and it is fair to say this is by far our biggest and most considered Server release to date.

We knew it was incredibly important to show issues that were both associated and not associated to an Epic, so that teams could effectively plan their sprints and versions in the story map, helping with capacity planning (i.e. story point estimation vs. past velocity).

We’re ecstatic to say that we have been able to address all of the limitations of the ‘Add Existing Issues’ feature from Version 4. The new ‘Backlog’ Panel allows our customer’s to achieve the following:

• Search for issues via text summary or issue key
• Groups issues without epics into sprints or versions for better sequencing
• Multi-select issues and drag and drop them onto the story map
• Apply quick filters to the backlog panel for focused search results

Despite the inclusion of the new ‘Backlog’ panel, we have worked hard to boost the story map’s performance as well as leverage version 3 of the Atlassian Design Guidelines (thanks to Atlassian’s Atlaskit library).

This release would not have been possible without feedback from our customer’s and them challenging us to think about our products in new and exciting ways. Thank you!

Want to check out the new release of Easy Agile User Story Maps? Start your free 30 day trial of Easy Agile User Story Maps here.

As always, we would love to hear any feedback on our newest release — use the Help button at the top of your story map.