See what’s proven, what’s being built, and why.

Columns are the same for every part of the business, so maps line up side by side:

• Establish: gaining what’s needed to take part, such as signing up or registering.
• Adjust: changing something that already exists, such as editing details.
• Act: the exchange the business exists for, such as paying or booking.
• Follow up: settling what already happened, such as chasing, disputing or asking for help.
• Terminate: ending something for good, such as cancelling or closing.

Stories that aren’t about a journey, such as reporting or compliance, live in a permanent Unassigned column. It’s a home, not a queue.

Each story is pinned down by scenarios: concrete Given / When / Then examples. A scenario’s colour is worked out, never set:

• Yellow while any ticket for it is still open.
• Red once every ticket is done, until a run against the real software passes, or after a run fails.
• Green only after a passing run. There is no button to mark it done.

A story’s status is rolled up from its scenarios. Adding new work to a green scenario sends it back to yellow, because the old evidence predates the new work.

Barnspec generates a small adapter class for each fact, action and role your scenarios use. You fill them in with calls into your application, and every scenario then runs on its own, from a clean start, as an ordinary test. Every run is recorded, pass or fail, and that record is what colours the map.

$ vendor/bin/port-generator generate reservations
$ vendor/bin/scenario-bridge run-all reservations --released   # keep released slices proven

Once a slice is released, its stories’ scenarios no longer change directly. A change is an elaboration in the current slice: new wording, plus scenarios added, amended or retired. When that slice is released, the elaboration is merged in, and what it replaced is kept as a record. Until then, the released behaviour keeps being proven.

Each released story gets an Impact: dated observations, each saying who made it. Releasing a slice asks about earlier slices’ unsettled rewards, but never blocks the release. Achieved settles only on the word of the people the story was for, or someone speaking for them. Impact never changes a story’s colour: green and “none” is an honest, useful combination.

Domain-Driven Design calls a business’s shared vocabulary its ubiquitous language. Barnspec builds it from the stories themselves: each role, subject, fact and action keeps the meaning it was given when it was created, and the glossary gathers them for each area of business. Who takes part, what they deal with and what can be true of it, and everything they can do.

Nothing is summarised or made up. It’s exactly what was written, sorted so any word can be found at a glance. Open it from the Glossary tab beside the map, or write it out next to the story pages, where the map links each area of business to its glossary.

$ vendor/bin/barnspec glossary --output-dir=docs/glossary   # a page per area of business, plus an index

The same words can be exported to Barncept as a graph of concepts.

An interactive wizard captures stories, and every step also has a scripted form for CI and AI agents.

$ vendor/bin/barnspec draft     # capture a rough story
$ vendor/bin/barnspec review    # turn it into a real one
$ vendor/bin/barnspec refine    # add its scenarios
$ vendor/bin/barnspec map --output-dir=docs/map   # an HTML story map

Everything is stored as readable JSON in .barnspec/, committed alongside your code.