Irie, Inc.

When assigning Business Value to stories, it helps to consider the story in context of other stories that propose to have a similar effect on the bottom-line, that is, their value proposition. For example, you might have a dozen stories that all propose to attract new customers. It is helpful to look at all those stories together in order to get a good feeling of how they compare to each other. This, in turn helps get a more objective measure of the business value that each has to offer.

It is important that you be able to associate more than one value proposition to a story. What attracts new customers may also encourage existing customers to upgrade their service. In that regard, those tools that do not facilitate the use of Tags, multiple values in a single field, or many-to-many relationships, are at a strong disadvantage when it comes to being able to implement this feature.

From a technical standpoint, implementing this behavior in the various tools is possible in roughly the same way as Role based grouping. You can use Tags, where tags are offered, or you can define a field/property with a set list of values. Their respective usability is the same as that from the previous segment on grouping by Role.

One notable difference is that the user interface of the Ideal Digital Tool can’t cheat and extract it from the user story text, you have to set it yourself. This may require a more sophisticated user interface, though what works for this should work equally well for managing Role assignments.

Usability Comparison Summary on a scale of 1 to 10