User Story Mapping and probabilistic forecasting
“We do Scrum, and…” — Episode 7
Note: this article discusses User Story Mapping, Probabilistic Forecasting, MVP, epics and user stories. These are NOT mentioned in the Scrum Guide. They are complementary practices or terms that CAN be used by a Scrum Team.
In a recent article Paddy Corry showed how you can do delivery planning using User Story Mapping. I believe he presented an awesome way to create a rough delivery plan.
Paddy’s article triggered me to show an alternative way using Probabilistic Forecasting.
Probabilistic Forecasting summarizes what is known about future events. You will not work with single-valued forecasts but you assign a probability to a number of different outcomes.
Probabilistic Forecasting based on historical data is an alternative proposed by #NoEstimates. You don’t make assumptions, you use actual data. This makes it a powerful way of planning.
Story Map example
Below is an example Story Map, the starting point for the delivery planning forecast.
