In agile projects, there are no requirements” is one common misconception of many about agile projects. In reality, agile projects have requirements, that typically start as stories and the process to elicit, gather and analyze them is done in a different fashion than it is done in waterfall, or “traditional” projects.

This session focuses on the actions, artifacts, and deliverables that need to take place in order to produce requirements that fully represent business value and the needs of stakeholders in an effective and efficient fashion. While the Product Backlog is owned by the Product Owner, the requirements management process is facilitated and practically led by team members with business analysis skills, or by an individual with the title (and the skills) of a Business Analyst.

This dynamic, interactive and hands-on session covers the entire requirements management process in agile projects, including exploring the difference between agile and waterfall requirements, applying concepts that help write effective user stories, supporting the process with various models and use cases, discussing agile planning, prioritization and backlog maintenance, and covering the requirements validation process through the demo and the iteration review.

Learning Objectives

Participants of this course will gain the ability to:

• Improve accuracy in identifying requirements while reducing time to communicate and document these requirements
• Apply concepts to enhance the skills to communicate necessary requirements to ensure acceptable project quality
• Identify tools and techniques to increase the productivity, effectiveness, and speed of development teams
• Master agile requirements analysis techniques, including user stories and lean modeling
• Explore techniques to establish the project scope through requirements prioritization
• Adapt techniques to validate requirements with stakeholders
• Decide how to estimate stories and plan releases and iterations (sprints)
• Elicit, document and manage requirements on Agile projects

Who Should Attend

The session is designed for BAs of all levels, from all types of environments. The session is also useful for team members, Scrum Masters and Product Owners – who can produce benefits for the project from effectively engaging the BAs and establishing clear boundaries and rules of engagement with those who act as BAs.

Prerequisites

Although there is no formal pre-requisite for this course, it is assumed that participants already have some basic knowledge or experience in Agile project management.

Materials

Students of this course receive a course workbook including printouts of all course presentation materials.

What You Will Learn