Yesterday I attended a Waterloo Agile Lean session on Story Mapping presented by Mark Levison. I had heard of Story Mapping but hadn't worked through it before. I liked the hands-on exercises approach Mark took to help us understand the process and benefits of that technique. This blog post is not about Story Mapping.
I love learning and take any opportunity I can to hear different speakers present on topics that I think may be of value. Sometimes I even attend the same talks and workshops when they are done by different speakers so that I can understand differences of style in presentation, stories, and tips/techniques for getting the ideas across to the audience/participants. Once I even attended the same topic by the same speaker 2 days in a row, and I learned something new/different the second time around! (It was a Cem Kaner talk when he was in our area a few years ago.)
Yes, I gained an appreciation of Story Mapping yesterday. More importantly, I learned a new anecdote from the speaker - one that got me thinking. At one point, Mark answered a question about managing a large backlog on a Scrum/Kanban-style (information radiator) board. The problem with really large backlogs of stuff to do (likely anything with more than 100 items in it), is that the items near the bottom become meaningless over time. You will probably never get to them because something more important always comes up.
