Spice up your refinements with Example Mapping

Do you spend a lot of time in refinement sessions? Do you still run into big surprises and lack of shared understanding when building the software, leading to rework and delays in feature delivery?

In this hands-on workshop, we introduce the team to Example Mapping, a simple workshop format that brings focus to refinements. It will get you faster to a shared understanding, surface big unknowns earlier, and make the process much more enjoyable.

Example Mapping is a simple, pen-and-paper technique invented by Matt Wynne (of Cucumber fame), which helps to have a more focused, structured conversation about your user stories. It is a collaborative workshop format that enables teams to build a shared understanding of scope and requirements quickly, leading to less rework, faster flow, and more enjoyable collaboration.

Example Mapping is particularly useful when:

• refinement sessions take a long time, and teams often discuss user stories over and over again;
• teams discover new acceptance criteria, business rules, or edge cases late in the development cycle;
• user stories tend to “explode” – they become bigger and bigger while a team is working on them;
• misunderstandings between developers, product owners, and stakeholders only become visible when a feature is almost done.

Benefits

This workshop will bring the following benefits for your organisation:

• better collaboration between developers, testers, and product;
• surface unknowns and ambiguities earlier, leading to lower risk and fewer misunderstandings;
• less rework, fewer defects;
• faster flow of work, from idea to production;
• happier developers.

Workshop contents

We start out with just enough theory to do a hands-on group exercise, applying Example Mapping to a case. There is enough room for reflection, discussion, and questions. We will also show how the examples that come up can be transformed into automated tests.

For the hands-on exercises, we offer two options:

• use a case that we bring in;
• work on your backlog.

Working on your backlog will make the workshop more impactful by allowing participants to apply the techniques to their own work.

Learning objectives

After attending this workshop, participants will be able to:

• use Example Mapping to make refinement sessions focused and more enjoyable;
• define clearly scoped user stories;
• split user stories more effectively;
• create test scenarios quickly for important business rules;
• identify unknowns and ambiguities early.

Audience & prerequisites

This workshop is for developers, product owners, scrum masters, agile coaches, testers. This workshop works best if the whole team participates.

Participants should have some experience with working in an agile way like Scrum or Kanban, and with user stories.

Practical information

• Duration: ½ or 1 day
• No laptop required
• This is an in-house workshop