How to use 'swim lanes' to assign future feature implementations into releases?

Question

I once remember seeing someone dividing all the features of a new product into swim lanes with a column for each functional area of the product and horizontal lanes to represent each development release, with the top horizontal lane being reserved for the unscheduled feature backlog.

The team would then move features down from the unscheduled backlog into the cells below to roughly indicate which release each feature is likely to go into.

Does this technique have a name and can anyone point me in the direction of any links explaining it further?

Answer 1

It's called Story Mapping. There are a whole bunch of different ways to do it, sometimes the top items are unscheduled, sometimes they are just a bunch of core concepts for the product that aren't directly related to specific tasks... Like anything else, you should customize it to your specific needs.