Irie, Inc.

As a Marketing user, I have some very specific needs of the system. Have you captured all of those needs? Only way to be sure is to be able to filter the story cards to include only those that are told from my perspective. I still need to be able to see all of the functional/feature groups, and all of the epic/use case groups, so that I can see if there is something I need to be thinking about. Also, when trying to assign business value, it helps to be able to see all of my user stories side-by-side so I can rank them in terms of the business value that they offer me.

Hopefully, the above makes the case adequately enough: It would add value to the backlog creation process to be able to view the backlog from the perspective of a particular role, in addition to the perspective of a particular feature group. So, how can I do that in the various tools?

Analog (3×5 cards) method
You can’t. A card’s place is represented by its physical presence. The only way you could do this is to make sure you make at least two copies of every user story (maybe in different colors) whenever you create one, and you put one in the feature group pile, and one in the appropriate role pile.
Usability: Very Low Downside: having two of every card is tedious, and means things will get out of sync. Don’t go there!

The Ideal Digital Tool
As I create the user story itself, when I type “as a ” I am then prompted with a pop-up list of all of the other roles I have ever created. I can select one, or I can make a new one. When I finish writing the story text, it will transparently pull the Role information out of the text, and use it to populate a ‘role’ field, a multi-select value field, or a relationship record, that allows me to find this story again by the role. If I don’t use the ‘as a’ template, I can still manage the role relationship directly, though the fact that I need to will encourage me to use the template. Or the tool will let you define a search pattern to extract the role so you can use your own story template. There may be a place in the application where I can define the relationships between roles. I will be able to filter any view by Role, or by multiple roles, quickly and easily. Ideally, I will be able to specify a full filter (where non-matching records are hidden) or a highlight filter, where matching records stand out from the rest, visually.

Excel
If you have broken the user story into three columns, one of which is the Role, then role based filtering/grouping is a snap.
Usability: High Downside: hard to have one record tell multiple stories (merged)

Mingle
When creating stories, you can add tags. So, for example, you might add a tag for role:Marketing to indicate that this user story is told from the perspective of the marketing stakeholder. Then, in any place where you can filter, you can filter to include only those items that have that tag.
Usability: Medium-High Downside: you have to remember to add the tag, and it does not support Highlight filtering, which can have undesirable side-effects

Rally
Like Mingle, you can add tags. Unfortunately, you can’t filter by those tags, so I’m not sure how good they are.
Usability: Medium Downside: Have to add the tag, doesn’t support any filtering on tags (that I can find)

VersionOne
You could co-opt the ‘Goal’ feature, and create a Goal for every Role in your backlog, and then associate them. This will allow you to have the many-to-many relationship that is needed, but then you couldn’t filter on it (I don’t think), you have to go to the Goals management screen, which is not ideal. And it is a hack. Or, you could define a ‘Role’ column, and pre-populate it with all the appropriate roles.
Usability: Medium Downside: If you forgot one, you need to have the administrator add it. And you can’t multi-select, so you can’t have multiple user stories in one backlog item, so you can’t merge them.

AgileOnDemand
Much like VersionOne, you can add a ‘Role’ field, and pre-populate it with options.
Usability: Low Downside: unfortunately, this doesn’t add the field to the WorkItem detail screen, so there is no easy way to set it. You can add it to the grid view, but then editing it is a bit tedious. Moreover, there is no clear way to filter by it.

Usability Comparison Summary on a scale of 1 to 10