Employ Feature Mapping To Capture Requirements Of A New Feature

Kiruthika Ganesan's profile
Kiruthika Ganesan

Head of Quality Assurance

Challenge Description

Missed requirements, how it ties up with the user journey and finding out what matters most to the customers is always a challenge. Feature Mapping is an effective discovery mechanism wherein different stakeholders can come together and explore a given functionality and get some direction on what needs to be built/considered. Can the group employ Feature Mapping and figure out the requirements to build for the said feature? 

Instructions:

For this challenge you will need a feature with very high level requirements that is to be shared with your group.

Explore

The group will then explore the feature by asking questions, brainstorming ideas and figuring out what needs to be done for the feature to come alive. This can be done in 2 stages;

Stage 1:

  • This part of the activity is to assess who will be the target audience and what will they care about the most? 

  • Result of this activity is to identify the various user personas and their main motive to use this feature

Stage 2

  • This part is to identify some of the finer details in the user journeys, alternate journeys, identify known risks and unknown risks, error cases,etc., with the help of positive and negative examples

  • Result of this activity is to map out the user journey in the form of sticky notes based on the various user actions performed by the identified personas.

Eg: Persona1-Step1-Step2-Step3-Outcome

Persona2-Step1-Step2-Step3-Outcome

Share

The group will then present the feature map and explain their approach on how they decided the user personas, the user journeys and most importantly what matters to the user.

Also reflect on the pending work if any -Are there any outstanding questions? Are there any other spikes or workshops needed to explore certain aspects further? Are we able to build in testability? Are there any specific test data requirements? etc.,

What you’ll learn
  • Describe the rules of an example mapping session
  • Run an example mapping session
  • Capture examples that describe a features behaviours that everyone agrees upon

Prerequisites

This activity is best run as a group with others from a team. It also requires a feature with some high level requirements that have been set out.

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