Collaborating and Communicating Agile Requirements

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. In this course, you will learn how to gather and manage these 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, allowing for a less "heavy" process in projects that can benefit from quick changes in direction. You will gain hands-on experience with techniques for gathering agile requirements. Through explanatory lectures with demonstrations combined with practice exercises, you will gain the experience needed to create requirements that meet business needs.

What You Will Learn

• Master writing user stories
• How known methods in traditional requirements processes can apply to Agile methods
• Communicate requirements using agile techniques to bridge the customers' and developers' needs
• Stakeholders and user roles to ensure that all requirement viewpoints are elicited
• Create and maintain a product backlog
• Prioritize requirements so that the most important customer needs are delivered first
• Formulate an iterative project plan with feedback cycles that keep the project 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

Audience

• Business customer or partner
• Product manager or customer representative
• Business or systems analyst
• Architect or developer
• QA tester or QA engineer
• Project manager or team leader
• IT manager/director

Prerequistes

Some experience in product development or product management is helpful but not required

Course Outline

1. Agile Overview

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

2. Project Initiation

• Project Charter
• Project Roles
• Project Planning
• Communication

3. Focus on the Customer

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

4. User Stories

• User Stories
• Goals and Objectives
• Acceptance Criteria and Acceptance Tests
• 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
• Planning Poker (Grenning 2002)
• Five Levels of Planning in Agile
• Estimating Team Velocity

7. Release Plan

• Iteration Estimates
• Prioritization Revisited
• Ownership and Participation
• Communication

8. Use Cases

• Use Case Advantages
• Use Case Elements
• Success Path
• Alternate Paths
• Exceptions

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

Exercises:

Exercise 1: Working in small teams, you will establish a project charter including goals and objectives for a sample project. You will participate in defining key roles for project team members and set clear expectations for project communication.

Exercise 2: Within your teams, you will brainstorm some customer roles for your example project. From the brainstorming, you will consolidate the larger list of roles into key roles that will be the focus of your sample project. For each of the key roles, each team will create personas and share them with the class.

Exercise 3: Led by the instructor, the class will come up with some user stories for a sample project. We will discuss how to determine as a team what is appropriate for your user stories to be effective.

Exercise 4: In small teams identified previously, you will engage in a story-writing workshop as a means of building a product backlog for your sample project. Subsequently, you will participate in prioritizing your product backlog and present the highest priority stories to the class.

Exercise 5: Using the estimating techniques taught using story points, you'll enjoy a few rounds of Planning Poker with your team to establish estimates for your highest priority stories. This fun and highly effective method of relative estimating is certain to be a valuable tool for you to incorporate into your own estimating process.

Exercise 6: Each team will establish a release plan for their sample project incorporating priority, estimates, and velocity as appropriate. We'll discuss how real experiences of fixed time and requirement projects working well with an Agile release plan.

Exercise 7: Teams will discuss and document use cases, including alternate paths and exceptions, for some of their high-priority stories. As a class, we'll discuss the relationship between use cases and stories and how they complement each other.

Course Labs