Agile Requirements: Collaborating to Define and Confirm Needs

Build skills defining small, valuable, well-defined product requirements for delivery. You learn how to create a shared understanding of product needs using collaborative techniques and slice them into well-understood, valuable chunks for development. This training focuses on iteration or work-in-progress (“Now-View”) within the context of the overall product (“Big-View”) and product releases (“Pre-View”). Through practical, integrated exercises, you learn to discover and prepare product backlog items, adapt analysis practices, and define product needs.

You experience how to slice requirements into right-sized stories, how to build user story maps, and practical techniques for making stories “ready” for iteration planning and team delivery. You learn to utilize option analysis and story slicing strategies, with a keen focus on business value.  This training emphasizes how to define and continually groom a healthy product backlog.

You gain an appreciation of both the content and the timing of requirements analysis in agile projects, and learn why it’s crucial to collaborate with the entire project community throughout each delivery cycle.

Understand how to calibrate the content, format, and timing of requirements analysis to prepare for and participate in planning (iteration or work-in progress; release and product roadmap) as well as the daily analysis needed to transform requirements into tests and code.

This course is endorsed by the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA®) and aligns with the IIBA’s Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK®) applicable tasks and techniques. By attending this course you’ll earn 14 PDs (Professional Development hours) for the two-day version, or 21 PDs for the three day version,  for initial certification or 14 CDUs (Continuing Development Units) for the two-day version or 21 CDUs for the three-day version. If you choose EBG's popular "Agile Jump-Start" package, the team participates in the Agile training and immediately applies agile practices on your agile project, coached by an EBG expert.

• Understand the agile framework
  o    Define how agile differs from traditional development
  o    Describe the three categories of stakeholders
  o    Define key characteristics of agile requirements
• Analyze, slice and elaborate backlog items
  o    Write user stories
  o    Build a user story map
  o    Analyze and prioritize options to identify “right size” user stories
  o    Utilize organic, lightweight models to aid in analyzing stories
  o    Identify and specify nonfunctional requirements
  o    Understand ways to assign business value to requirements 
  o    Estimate user stories
  o    Write scenarios and acceptance tests
• Plan agile requirements 
  o    Identify minimum marketable features
  o    Describe the purpose of product roadmaps
  o    Consider a variety of ways to adapt your agile requirements work
  
• Appreciate the business value of just-in-time, just enough agile analysis
• Understand how requirements are the basis for agile planning

• Agile vs traditional
• The product partnership
• Agile roles
• Requirements types
• User stories and user story map
• Value
• Estimating

2. Product: Slicing Requirements for Value

• Product backlog
• Lifecycle of backlog item
• Seven dimensions of product requirements
• Functional requirements – four dimensions: User role, action, data, control
• Explore and evaluate
• Analysis models
• Scenarios
• Steel rod, thread
• Acceptance tests
• Data tests
• Given-when-then tests
• Nonfunctional requirements – three dimensions: interfaces, quality attributes, design and implementation constraints
• Cross cutting requirements
• User story heuristics

3. Plans

• Three views
• Features, MMFs
• Steps for valuing requirements
• Plan acceptance criteria
• Roadmaps
• Risks, dependencies
• Adapting agile analysis

4. Preparation

• Agile planning and analysis
• Groom the backlog
• Agile requirements ready checklist

• EBG works with you to decide which of a variety of exercises and simulations—all based on an integrated case study—to use in the training
• Add advanced topics (an additional day or replaces basic content). These include:
• Agile Dependency Analysis
• Agile Business Rules