Agile Analysis in Practice
Summary
Agile Analysis in Practice is a highly interactive learning workshop that builds on existing software development skills and instills specific practices on how to more effectively work with business and software development teams throughout the lifecycle of an Agile project. This course will help participants understand how to gather, express and manage changing business and technical requirements in an agile environment.
Course Outline
| Audience |
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| Duration | 1 day |
| Learning Objectives |
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About Patricia Mandarino
Patti is an accounting professional turned IT specialist. She has 18 years of software development experience with ThoughtWorks professional services, contributing in such roles as Business Analyst, Tester, Project and Iteration Manager. Her project experience has been focused on using Agile development practices in various sourcing models including co-sourced, fully out-sourced and distributed. Her experience consists of delivery, IT organizational transformation and Agile adoption style projects. Her software development experience and strengths in training and coaching has brought her to ThoughtWorks Studios as a full time Trainer and Coach.
Workshop Agenda
Introduction
- Introduction of trainers
- Hopes & Fears exercise
- Learning objectives
- Intended audience
- Agile best practices review
Introduction to Agile Analysis
- Responsibilities & accountabilities of a BA on an agile project
- Agile analysis lifecycle discussion
- Problem identification through Iteration analysis
- Agile artifacts created throughout the lifecycle and when
Before Development Starts
- How a common understanding at all phases reduces errors and provides efficiency
- A discussion of techniques for:
- Defining the problem case
- Project vision
- Prioritization
- Sliders
- Games
- Requirements gathering
- Roles / Goals
- Personae
- Scenarios
- Prototyping
Requirements (aka Stories)
- Representation of the concepts of story, iteration, release
- The parts of a story card
- As a, I want to, so that...
- Role, Goal, Value concepts
- Review of each of the INVEST principles
- INVEST principle exercise
- Looking at anti-patterns and discussing how to make them better
- Other story writing guidelines
- A look at inception level acceptance criteria
- Why assumptions are important when initially writing stories
- Ways to represent non functional requirements - stories, notes tree
- A look at Themes, Epics and how they are broken down into stories.
Iteration Level Analysis
- A review of the artifacts produced during inception and what is to come
- Anatomy of an iteration
- Discussion about how the analyst is working on stories from 3 different iterations at one time
- A proposed process for creating narratives
- Narrative details - template, why narratives, how do they benefit various roles
- Iteration level acceptance criteria - examples, why the different level of detail, who writes them
- Showcases - why do them, who attends, what is the outcome
- Other methods of showing progress or status of stories
Analysis Challenges
- Techniques for splitting stories into smaller stories
- How to handle the new stories
- How to avoid story explosion
- One story turns into many
- Scope creep or missed requirements
- Managing story analysis
- Introducing the concept of the Last Responsible Moment and how to handle it
Advanced Topics
- The role of user experience in agile analysis
- Contextual inquiry
- Interaction design
- Prototyping
- Analysis in distributed projects
- Communication and strategies for supporting developers and QA
