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Agile Fundamentals

Duration:

3 Days

Course Overview:

This three-day comprehensive course builds knowledge and skills in the agile approach to defining and analyzing requirements. Students learn about the role of the business analyst on agile projects, and how to write user stories, which are the most common method of representing requirements in agile methods. Students learn techniques for building and managing a Product Backlog of user stories and techniques for prioritizing requirements for releases and iterations.

Students learn conditions of success for agile methods, how to scale the agile approach for large teams, and how to adapt current business analysis methods to become more agile.

The agile method Scrum will be used as a reference method during the course, but techniques described also apply to other agile methods.

Students apply what is learned in a series of hands-on activities using a realistic case study that covers the agile requirements process, with example solutions.

This course can also be taught on-site for a project team. The team’s project can be used as the basis for course activities, resulting in the creation of key artifacts, such as the Product Backlog, the selection and prioritization of themes and stories for releases and iterations, and release and iteration plans.

PDU Credits: 21

*New Horizons of Des Moines does not guarantee PDU, CDU, or CEU credits. Submit your eligible credit hours, and the respective governing body will determine if you qualify.

Objectives:

  • Describe agile values and principles
  • Explain agile roles and responsibilities
  • Describe agile business analysis activities
  • Develop user stories and acceptance tests
  • Define nonfunctional requirements and business rules using an agile approach
  • Use user story mapping to identify key functionality for a release
  • Describe and apply release theme and user story prioritization techniques
  • Estimate user story size using story points and planning poker
  • Create release and iteration plans based on user stories
  • Describe techniques for negotiating changes to user stories during an iteration
  • Describe conditions of success for implementing agile
  • Describe ways to adapt the agile requirements approach
  • Describe approaches for scaling agile for large teams
  • Conduct an agile retrospective

Audience:

This course is valuable for all agile team members: business analysts, Product Owners, customer, users, Scrum Masters or project coaches, testers, developers and architects - anyone on a project who is involved in eliciting, defining, analyzing, and validating business needs and requirements in order to transform them into working software.

Prerequisites:

An awareness of agile and business analysis methods is helpful, but not required.

Topics:

Agile Basics

  • Agile and lean values and principles
  • Contrasting agile and waterfall methods
  • Agile roles and responsibilities
  • The agile business analyst
  • The agile team environment
  • Iteration Zero activities
  • Defining the vision
  • Activity: Define the vision

Defining Agile Requirements

  • An agile requirements process
  • Identifying user roles
  • Creating personas
  • Activity: Identify user roles and create a persona
  • Creating the Product Backlog
    • User story components: The 3 C's
    • Guidelines for writing user stories
    • Story writing workshops
    • Creating low-fidelity prototypes to elicit user stories
    • Activity: Story writing workshop
    • Deriving user stories from epics
    • Identifying story "smells" to avoid
  • Defining nonfunctional requirements and business rules
  • Activity: Define nonfunctional requirements and business rules using an agile approach
  • Managing user stories with agile tools
  • Requirements traceability in agile projects

Analyzing and Prioritizing Customer Needs

  • Levels of planning in agile
  • Creating a product roadmap Prioritizing for releases
    • Prioritizing themes for releases
    • Financial prioritization techniques
    • Using the Kano model to prioritize desirability
    • Using user story mapping to identify key functionality
    • Activity: User story mapping
    • Using the MoSCoW rules to prioritize user stories within the release backlog
    • Activity: Prioritize user stories

Planning Releases and Iterations

  • Estimating user stories
    • Story points and ideal days
    • Estimating with Planning Poker
    • Activity: Estimate user stories with Planning Poker
  • Planning releases
    • Forecasting velocity
    • Selecting an iteration length
    • Creating a release plan
    • Activity: Create a release plan
  • Planning iterations
    • Decomposing stories into tasks
    • Estimating tasks
    • Creating an iteration plan on the Team Board
    • Activity: Create an iteration plan

Conducting Iterations

  • Activities during iterations
    • The daily stand-up meeting
    • Updating the Team Board
    • Using burndown charts to track progress
    • Activity: Simulate a daily stand-up and update the Team Board
    • The iteration review meeting
    • Managing changes to the project backlog
  • Writing acceptance tests for user stories
  • Activity: Writing acceptance tests
  • Defining "done on agile" projects
  • Business analysis activities
    • Characteristics of an effective customer representative
    • Using user proxies
    • Agile modeling
    • Creating requirements runway during iterations
    • Just-in-time requirements elaboration
    • Agile use cases
    • Activity: Write an agile use case
  • Negotiating changes during an iteration
    • Techniques for splitting user stories
    • Guidelines for re-estimating
    • Growing stories iteratively over iterations
    • Activity: Negotiate changes in story size
  • Agile technical practices
  • Releasing software into production

Adapting and Scaling Agile

  • Adapting agile methods
  • Conditions for success for implementing agile methods
  • Motivations for implementing agile methods
  • Self-organizing teams
    • Characteristics of effective self-organizing teams
    • Establishing ground rules
    • Activity: Team self-assessment
  • Scaling agile methods
    • Methods used to scale agile methods for larger teams
    • Communication considerations for agile teams
  • Agile retrospectives
    • Course summary
    • Activity: Course retrospective

*Content, days, and times vary depending on your location. Please view the outline prior to purchase or contact the local center for more information.