Agile Requirements: Collaborating to Define and Confirm Needs

This training emphasizes how to define and continually groom a healthy product backlog.

Learn effective, efficient, and creative ways for stakeholders to converse as “product partners” for continual value delivery. You gain an appreciation of both the content and the timing of requirements analysis in agile projects, and learn why it’s crucial for the entire project community to collaborate throughout each delivery cycle.

You experience the essential practices and many of the tools and techniques in Ellen Gottesdiener and Mary Gorman’s popular book, Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning and Analysis.

Through practical, integrated exercises you learn to holistically analyze product needs and make just-in-time decisions on what to deliver next. Using collaborative techniques, you learn to slice features and stories into well-understood, valuable chunks. You experience how to engage in “structured conversations” to discover and allocate high-value options for the next delivery cycle, at any level of agile product planning.

These practices are vital to prepare for and participate in planning (iteration or work-in progress; release and product roadmap) as well as the daily analysis needed to continually groom your product backlog and prepare requirements for coding and testing.

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) or 14 CDUs (Continuing Development Units). 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    Describe how agile differs from traditional development
  o    Define key characteristics of agile requirements   
• Understand key concepts foundational to rapidly discovering product needs
• Analyze product needs
  o    Use the 7 Product Dimensions to holistically to discover and allocate product needs
  o    Apply an explore-then-evaluate pattern to identify high-value product options
  o    Assemble options into cohesive stories
  o    Confirm stories with scenarios and acceptance tests
• Allocate product needs
• Consider a variety of ways to adapt your agile analysis work

The participant’s manual includes slides, exercises and supplemental materials. Participants also receive their own copy of Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning and Analysis.

• Key concepts
• Product
• Product Partners
• Value
• Product Backlog
• Intro to Agile
• Intro to Stories

2. The Structured Conversation

• The seven dimensions of product requirements
• Explore and evaluate the user, action, data, control product dimensions
• Analysis models
• Scenarios
• Steel rod, thread
• Acceptance tests
• Given-when-then tests
• Explore and evaluate the interface, quality attribute, environment product dimensions
• Crosscutting requirements
• Estimating

3. Allocate Product Needs

• Agile plans and views
• Adapt the 7 Product Dimensions

4. Wrap

Supplemental Materials

Customize Your Agenda Based on Participants’  Background and Needs:

• EBG works with you to select the appropriate exercises and simulations
• Add advanced topics (an additional day or replaces basic content).
• Agile Dependency Analysis
• Agile Business Rules