Agile Analysis Boot Camp
Course Length: 2 days
DESCRIPTION
Agile teams and organizations find out sooner or later, that with agile, building the wrong things faster is very possible if you leave out a key component: understanding the real problem and evaluating the impact of the potential solution before going off and doing your sprint as fast as you can. Our goal is to provide agile analysis approaches and techniques for your team to ensure the right thing is built, have user stories that clearly identify the minimum viable product, and potentially eliminate unnecessary stories.
The course provides practical guidance on handling complex projects, spontaneous scenarios and decision points that occur on an agile project. Our material covers many variations of agile analysis so that each technique taught can be adapted to different types of projects, different types of agile teams, and even a variety of agile frameworks.
TARGET AUDIENCE
This course is designed for anyone working on an agile team, but is especially helpful for product owners, business analysts, systems analysts, or any other team member involved with requirements on an agile project. This course may also be appropriate for individuals who manage individuals working on an agile team and need a more in-depth understanding of the process and skills useful for an agile team.
PREREQUISITES
None
COURSE OUTLINE
INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS ANALYSIS IN AN AGILE ENVIRONMENT
- Understanding the agile evolution
- Level-setting the fundamentals of the Agile Manifesto
- Review the pros and cons of various agile approaches (including a brief of SAFe)
- Understanding agile project characteristics and their impact on the approach to use
- Workshop: Mock sprint
ANALYSIS TECHNIQUES APPLIED ON AN AGILE TEAM
- Review scope and problem statement
- Define SMART objectives used as decision filters
- Identify business drivers
- Create a feature poster
- Apply relative sizing
- Identify dependencies
- Determine the minimum viable product
- Take user stories from discovery to ready to done
- Workshop: Walk through a mock Scrum/planning case study
- Define and practice various agile planning activities
- Apply analysis techniques for the creation of features and stories
- Practice managing value during design, build, and test
TAKING USER STORIES TO THE NEXT LEVEL
- User stories – more than the 3 Cs
- Identify the key criteria for the definition of ready and done
- Apply analysis techniques to create a discovery board and backlog
- Identify the analysis tasks for backlog refinement and prioritization
- Applying the 4 core components of requirements
- Explore 21 ways to break down a story
- Workshop: Writing user stories, creating acceptance criteria, examples, test cases
ANALYSIS TECHNIQUES APPLIED USING KANBAN CONCEPTS
- Discuss WIP, Kanban board, workflow states
- Define and address urgent/expedited issues
- Utilize swarming to solve roadblocks
- Manage with no sprints, continuous release
- Workshop: Walk through a mock Kanban case study
- Define and practice various agile planning activities in Kanban
- Apply analysis techniques for the creation of work Items
- Practice managing value during design, build, and test
TROUBLESHOOTING AGILE CHALLENGES
- Discuss how SAFe helps enterprise (program, portfolio) management of agile teams
- Troubleshooting agile challenges: shark tank exercise
- Team members not co-located
- No scrum master
- Not using the user story forum
- No documentation
- Introducing changes during a sprint
- Lack of regular backlog grooming
- Only putting user stories in a sprint (100% user stories)
- Team member being pulled off to do support work
- Unending enhancements without measuring ROI
- Team has abandoned retrospectives
- Implementing agile tools
- Being lean but not too lean
COURSE SUMMARY
- Bringing it all together – learning backlog review
- Develop an action plan with next steps on the student’s current project