Collaborating and Communicating Agile Requirements

Avoid project failure due to poor requirements gathering, analysis and planning.Traditional requirements documents may not contain complete and accurate requirements due to rapidly changing business environments and priorities. These requirements are documented in a requirements specification, with changes managed through a change process.

This 2-day course will demonstrate alternative ways of documenting requirements and managing changes. You will explore how these alternatives can allow for a leaner process in projects that benefit from quick changes in direction. You’ll gain hands-on experience with techniques for gathering Agile requirements through explanatory lectures, practice exercises and demonstrations, so you can elicit effective requirements for your Agile project.

Also Available as:

• Live Online
• Onsite

How You Will Benefit

• Learn the basics—then master the techniques of effective Agile requirements
• Use an Agile approach in an organization with heavy documentation requirements
• Settle the misunderstanding over cases vs. user stories
• Write user stories to effectively deliver product features that meet customer expectations
• Discover how methods in traditional requirements elicitation processes can apply to Agile methods
• Monitor ROI when gathering requirements and planning their delivery
• Break down large projects into manageable components for iterative delivery
• Communicate requirements using Agile techniques to bridge the gap between customer and developer desires
• Prioritize requirements so highest business values are delivered first
• Formulate iterative project plans with feedback cycles to keep projects on track
• Estimate business value for requirements to track how a project contributes to the enterprise
• Develop requirements in an iterative approach to capture the details at the appropriate time

What You Will Cover

• Defining roles for the project team and determining appropriate communication
• Experiencing the value of an elaborative requirements-gathering process
• Defining customer roles and personas
• Documenting requirements with user stories
• Determining business value and priority for each user story
• Participating in engaging and innovative estimating techniques
• Seeing how iterations fit into an easy-to-communicate product release plan
• Documenting requirement details with user cases, process flows and story maps
• Exploring advanced requirements elicitation techniques to fit projects of any size and duration
• Planning and executing an iteration cycle
• Learning how to continuously improve requirements collaboration

Extended Seminar Outline

Print this page Extended Seminar Outline Seminar #76004 1. Agile Overview

• Agile Manifesto
• Agile Principles
• Agile Methodologies
• Agile Benefits

2. Project Initiation

• The Project Vision, effectively communicating what the project is, and why it is valuable
• Project Roles
• Project Planning
• Communication

3. Focus on the Customer

• Customer Involvement
• User Roles
• Creating and Using Customer Personas
• Constraints

4. User Stories

• Breaking down large requirements into manageable stories
• How to write User Stories
• Identifying the Goals and Objectives of each requirement
• How to gather and apply Acceptance Criteria and Acceptance Tests to each requirement
• How to identify and write Non-user Stories

5. Product Backlog

• Who owns the Product Backlog
• Functional and Non-functional Requirements
• Story-Writing Workshop
• Prioritizing the Product Backlog
• Maintaining the Product Backlog
• Techniques for further elaboration

6. Estimating and Planning

• Relative vs. Actual Estimating
• Using Story Points to assign relative value
• Planning Poker as a technique to elicit collaborative estimates
• Estimating Team Velocity

7. Release Plan

• Iteration Estimates based on team capacity
• Prioritization Revisited
• Ownership and Participation
• Team communication and commitment

8. Advanced Requirements Elicitation

• Story Mapping Techniques
• How to easily break down stories to fit into iterations
• Use Cases vs. user stories. (No, you don’t need to choose one or the other!)
• Using the entire team to gather requirements, not just the BA’s
• Supporting documentation for your project
• How to satisfy organizational project documentation requirements while remaining Agile

9. Iteration Plan and Execution

• Iteration Planning
• Defining “Done”
• Test-Driven, Test Often
• Demonstrate Working Software (Delivered Requirements)
• Inspect and Adapt applied to Requirements
• Finding your rhythm

10. Retrospective on Communicating Requirements
When using Agile methods, retrospectives are a key practice. We will take an opportunity to review our learning collectively, and to look at how we can improve. Each participant will identify one or two things that they will adapt in their working environment based on their learning. The instructor will also identify any elements of the course that should be adapted for a better learning experience, so future course participants can also benefit from our learning.

Who Should Attend

This course is designed for anyone who is considering using Agile methodology for software development, including project managers, analysts, developers, programmers, testers, IT managers/directors, software engineers, software architects, software managers, testing managers, team leaders and customers.