Deep Dive Models in Agile (Part 2): Feature Trees

Candase is a Senior Product Manager at Seilevel and a PMI-Agile Certified Practitioner who trains and coaches product owners, ScrumMasters and business analysts on agile approaches as well as championing products in those roles for clients.

  Agile  

This series provides valuable information for the product owner community to use additional good practices in their projects. In each installment, we take one of the most commonly used visual models in agile and explain how to create one and how to use one to help build, groom or elaborate your agile backlog.

Following the first entry on process flows, we now look at the feature tree. (Other editions in this series will include: business data diagrams, state tables/state diagrams, decision trees/decision tables and business objectives models.)

What is a feature tree?
A feature tree is a requirements modeling language (RML) objectives model that shows the full scope of features for a project or product on a single page in a tree format. A feature is just a short-form description of functionality provided by the project or product that brings value to the end user. The feature tree is great for bringing new people on a project up to speed and showing executives, business stakeholders or customers all the features that are in scope for a project or release.

The feature tree is similar in shape to a fishbone diagram or an Ishikawa diagram, but shows levels of features instead of root-cause analysis. It’s easier to read than a flat list of features for a product because the feature tree groups them into logical buckets; but feature trees are very similar in function …

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