Featmap

Featmap is a user story mapping tool for product people to build, plan and communicate product backlogs.

• Introduction
  • Purpose
  • Features
  • Intended audience
  • Motivation
• Getting started
• Self hosting
  • Requirements
  • Download
  • Configuration
  • Run
  • Upgrade
  • Building from source and running with docker-compose
• Monetization
• License

Introduction

Featmap is an open source user story mapping tool. It is built using React, Typescript and Go.

Purpose

Featmap was built for product people to take advantage of a technique called user story mapping. User story mapping, or just story mapping, is an effective tool to create, plan and communicate your product backlog. Story mapping was created by Jeff Patton and its primary utility is providing us with an overview of the entire product and how user goals are broken down into a series of tasks. Finally, it helps us to define valuable product slices (releases) and prioritize between them.

Features

• Personas
• Markdown editing
• Discuss user stories
• Share your user story maps with external stakeholders
• User story annotations
• User story estimates with roll-ups

Intended audience

Featmap is great for product managers, product owners or just about anyone who is building products. Featmap can also be used as a light weight work item management system for development teams.

Motivation

There are many user story mapping tools, however none are really focused on easy-of-use and simplicity. Featmap was built to fill that gap. We hope you will find it as useful as we found building it.

Getting started

You have two choices when it comes to using Featmap.

1. Use our hosted service at https://www.featmap.com. This is the most simple way of using Featmap. Note that we also offer a free trial.
2. Host it yourself by running it on you own server, without cost. Please refer to the instructions for self-hosting.

Self hosting

Featmap can be run on your own server.

Requirements

Featmap runs on top of PostgreSQL, so make sure you have it running on your system. At this step, make sure to setup the credentials and database that Featmap will use.

Download

Download the Featmap binary for your respective platform and save it somewhere on your system. If needed, make it executable on your system.

Configuration

In the directory where you placed the binary, create a file called conf.json.

Here's a sample conf.json you can use:

{
  "appSiteURL": "https://localhost:5000",
  "dbConnectionString": "postgresql://postgres:postgres@postgres:5432/postgres?sslmode=disable",
  "jwtSecret": "ChangeMeForProduction",
  "port": "5000",
  "emailFrom": "",
  "smtpServer": "",
  "smtpPort": "587",
  "smtpUser": "",
  "smtpPass": "",
  "environment": "development"
}

Setting	Description
appSiteURL	The url to where you will be hosting the app.
dbConnectionString	The connection string to the PostgreSQL database that Featmap should connect to.
jwtSecret	This setting is used to secure the cookies produced by Featmap. Generate a random string and keep it safe!
port	The port that Featmap should run on.
emailFrom	The email adress that should be used as sender when sending invitation and password reset mails.
smtpServer	SMTP server for sending emails.
smtpPort	Optional Will default to port 587 if not specified.
smtpUser	SMTP server username.
smtpPass	SMTP server password.
environment	Optional If set to development, Featmap assumes your are not running on https and the the backend will not serve secure cookies. Remove this setting if you have set it up to run https.

Run

Execute the binary.

./featmap-1.0.0-linux-amd64
Serving on port 5000

Open a browser to http://localhost:5000 and you are ready to go!

Upgrading

Just download the latest release and swap out the executable. Remember to backup your database and the old executable.

Building from source and running with docker-compose

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/amborle/featmap.git

Navigate to the repository.

cd featmap

Let's copy the configuration files

cp config/.env .
cp config/conf.json .

Now let's build it.

docker-compose build

Startup the services, the app should now be available on the port you defined in you configuration files (default 5000).

docker-compose up -d

Upgrading

Remember to backup your database (/data), just in case.

Pull down the latest source

git pull

Now let's rebuild it.

docker-compose build --no-cache

And finally run it.

docker-compose up -d

Monetization

We believe Featmap is a great tool for product people and we want as many as possible to benefit from it, this is our primary goal. Therefore Featmap is open source and we offer Featmap free of charge for anybody to run on their own server. That being said, it would also be great if Featmap can generate some income. Featmap is offered as a paid service over at https://www.featmap.com. We believe this model is great because it allows us to sustainably build an open source app that as many as possible can benefit from.

License

Featmap is licensed under Business Source License 1.1. See license