Course Description
In this two day training, learn how to:
Master writing user stories
Relate traditional analysis processes to the Agile methodology
Create user personas and use them within user story creation
Manage various types of backlog items
Formulate a backlog through the five levels of planning
Prioritize and refine the backlog over the course of a roadmap
Utilize story writing techniques that align the business and development team
Prepare the development team for sprints
Handle and adjust to team feedback
Apply what you have learned to real life scenarios within your own organization
Agile Requirements Gathering
Project failures are often due to poor requirements gathering, analysis and planning. Traditional requirements documents may not contain complete and accurate requirements due to rapidly changing business environments. Agile requirements gathering, by moving detailed requirements closer to implementation, allows for rapid response to change. This "User Story Workshop" will show you how to define and manage these requirements effectively.
Organizing and Managing Requirements
Traditional requirements are documented in a requirements specification. Changes to the requirements are managed through a change process. This course will demonstrate alternative ways of documenting requirements and managing changes. These alternatives can allow for a less "heavy" process in projects that can benefit from quick changes in direction.
Business Analysis in the Agile world
Business analysis is an essential function in every project, whether it be traditional, incremental or Agile. Effective analysis performed by skilled business analysts can make the difference between successful and challenged projects. This practical workshop provides participants with an understanding of the changing role of the business analyst, the tools and techniques best suited to Agile, and the timing for performing key tasks and events.
Discover Real-World Techniques
This two-day course will give you hands-on experience with techniques for defining Agile requirements. Explanatory lectures with demonstrations, combined with practice exercises will provide you with the experience needed to create user stories that meet business needs.
In-Class Group Exercises:
- In-class exercises help you practice the fundamentals of story writing and the techniques that will increase their effectiveness. With our exercises you will learn ways to manage a roadmap with various levels of planning and details, learning to optimize time spent where it is most beneficial to the customer.
- Define customer roles and personas
- Document requirements with user stories
- Create a roadmap utilizing Features and Epics
- Create and maintain a product backlog
- Participate and engage in story writing techniques, such as process mapping
- Utilize learned skills and apply them to real world examples within your organization
20 Immediate Benefits of Participating in this Workshop
- Learn how to adapt quickly and positively to rapidly changing business needs and priorities
- Learn how to collaborate on requirements for a project
- Align development to business needs to provide business value quickly
- Learn the benefits of using Agile methods to communicate requirements
- Understand the five levels of planning in Agile
- Use agile requirements as an effective basis for planning and testing
- Understand the characteristics of a well-written agile requirement
- Understand how to plan frequent releases so that customers can recognize benefit quickly
- Learn mapping techniques for identifying the stories of larger releases
- Minimize risks of ineffective solutions by obtaining frequent feedback
- Shorten project schedules by prioritizing requirements to get the most important needs met first
- Keep business requirements focused on the customer
- Model user roles to capture the needs of specific users
- Identify gaps not usually found or corrected in requirements gathering
- Reduce requirements inventory in process
- Define the right requirements at the right time
- Know what to do when new technologies render features of your project obsolete
- Learn how to determine an iteration plan
- Get earlier validation of requirements against a working system to keep a project moving in the right direction
- Have real life user stories to bring back to your organization and build your initial backlog
Substitution & Cancellation Policy:
You may cancel or reschedule up to 21 days prior to the start date of the class at no penalty. For any cancellation or reschedule requests within 21 days, the full course tuition is still due and not eligible for refund. Any paid tuition will be credited towards a future class and must be used within 12 months.
*Partner delivered courses may be subject to different cancellation terms
Agenda
Agile Overview
- What is Agile
- Why Agile
- Agile versus Waterfall
Business Analyst activities in Agile
- Why a well written story is beneficial
- Analyst activities of Waterfall that translate to Agile
- Differences when aligning to Agile
- How the Analyst role aligns with the Agile Manifesto
User Personas
- Understanding User Personas
Team Exercise: Teams will create User Personas to understand the concept and identify details that make them unique
- Using User Personas inside a story
- Determining user experience
- Identifying roles
User Story Overview
- What is a User Story
- Role, Goal, Benefit
- Acceptance Criteria best practices
- Examples
Team Exercise: Teams will practice writing stories using the Roles identified from the User Persona exercise. As a group acceptance criteria will be written, simulating a backlog grooming session.
- Other types of backlog items
- Spikes
- What is a spike?
- How to use them
- Example
- Non-functional (tech debt)
- What is a non-functional requirement?
- How to use them
- Example
- Defects
- Ways to manage defects
- Example
Team Exercise: Individually the group will write an example of a Spike, Non-Functional requirement and a Defect. Focusing on what makes them unique and how best to document the details for the development team.
5 Levels of Planning
Team Exercise:Teams will create a list of features, focusing on the evolution of an application and ways in which to build upon a feature over time.
Team Exercise: Teams will create Epics for the features identified in the previous exercise, focusing on how to break down the work into valuable slices.
- Product Backlog
- Prioritization techniques
Hands on User Story Writing Workshop
Team Exercise: The group will critique stories that have been given to them, learning what to look for when grooming stories (size, unclear, dependencies).
Team Exercise: Teams will write stories that relate to the Epics written in the previous exercise. Focusing on the INVEST strategy of story writing and using group feedback to further refine.
Building a Comprehensive Release Plan and Backlog
- Process Mapping
- Story Mapping
Team Exercise: The group will be given a sample process map, they will break the process into stories that remain independent and valuable, even if the value varies.
Prep and Support of Sprints
- Story Writing Sessions
- Backlog Grooming
- Relative Sizing
- Definition of Ready
- Story Preparation Kanban
- Backlog Prioritization
- Release Planning
Real World Workshop
Team Exercise: Individually, the group will get to focus on real world examples, getting feedback from the group intermittently, similar to a series of grooming sessions. Ideally bringing these stories back to their own projects.
Retrospective
- Handling and Adjusting to Team Feedback
- Educating Others