Agile Boot Camp: An Immersive Introduction

Bring your team together and jumpstart your Agile practice.The only route to Agile success is practice. Just like quality software development itself, Agile is more art than science. The art of Agile must be practiced and finely tuned over multiple iterations.

In this three-day Agile Boot Camp you will put the knowledge, skills, tools and techniques you are taught to work. The classroom will be divided into Agile teams and your expert instructor will drive each team through the Agile process from Vision to Daily planning and execution. Your instructor will answer questions with real world experience, as all instructors have Agile experience “in the trenches.”

How You Will Benefit

• Apply Agile principles and best practices from across methodologies
• Discover how to conduct Agile Retrospectives for continuous adaptation
• Learn different approaches to Agile architectures and designs that supports more incremental and emergent projects
• Transform your estimating practices to give executives and customers what they need more easily and accurately
• Identify pitfalls and failure potential of poorly disciplined Agile teams
• Adopt Agile practices within your existing framework
• Empower your team to be responsible for total project success
• Conduct exercises in a real-world Agile development unit—see firsthand how roles intertwine to get the work done
• Using a Scrum backdrop, acquire techniques for scaling Agile
• Use velocity-driven planning to support fixed date/fixed price environments
• Learn to adapt from a plan-driven approach to continuous planning
• Discuss tools and techniques specific to your organization's environment
• Practice coaching and communicating as a ScrumMaster and leverage the differences between a ScrumMaster and a traditional Project Manager
• Eliminate divides between the development team and customer team by creating shared goals for project success beyond contractual requirements

What You Will Cover

• Practice developing and participating in self-organized teams
• Create and communicate a Product Vision to ensure the delivery of true product value
• Learn to understand your customer and develop user roles and personas
• Initiate the requirements process by developing user stories and your product backlog
• Put together product themes from your user stories and establish a desired product roadmap
• Conduct story point estimating to determine effort needed for user stories to ultimately determine iteration(s) length
• Take into consideration assumed team velocity with story point estimates and user story priorities to come up with you release plan
• Engage the planning and execution of your iteration(s)
• Conduct retrospectives after each iteration
• Run a course retrospective to enable an individual plan of execution on how to conduct Agile in your environment

Extended Seminar Outline

Print this page Extended Seminar Outline Seminar #76002 Agile Introduction and Overview

• Why Agile
• Agile methods
• Agile benefits
• Agile basics - understanding the lingo

Forming the Agile Team

• Team roles
• Process Expectations
• Self-organizing teams - where flexibility exists
• Communication - inside and out

Product Vision

• Five levels of planning: vision, roadmap, release, iteration and daily
• Importance of product vision
• Creating and communicating vision
• Complete team exercise writing a vision statement
• Prepare an actual product vision for your product

Focus on the Customer

• User roles
• Customer personas
• Customer participation

Creating a Product Backlog

• User stories
• Acceptance tests
• What makes a good story (sizing and substance)
• Story writing workshop

Product Roadmap

• Product Themes
• Importance of Focus
• Creating the Roadmap
• Communication
• Maintaining the Roadmap

Prioritizing the Product Backlog

• Methods for prioritizing
• Building trust
• Expectations for prioritizing stories

Estimating

• Actual vs. Relative estimating
• Story Points
• Planning Poker
• Estimating team velocity

Release Planning

• Utilizing velocity
• Continuous integration
• Regular cadence

Who Should Attend

This immersion course is recommended for all team members responsible for delivering outstanding software. Cross functional teams can become familiar with Agile methods and learn the basics together.

Special Feature

The International Consortium for Agile has worked with experts around the world to develop an education roadmap of training and certification for all specialties involved in Agile development. This course has been approved and earns all students the Certified ICAgile Professional designation upon completion of the course.