Credits: 14 PDUs / 2 Days

Course Level: Basic/Intermediate

Prerequisites:
No prerequisites – This course suitable for both novices and experienced people who need to manage and communicate requirements for Agile projects. It is recommended that participants complete the BA01 – Business Analysis Essentials course prior to enrolling or have equivalent experience. Understanding concepts of project management and business analysis is helpful.

Course Abstract:
Project success is dependent on how effective you manage change. Many traditional project teams run into trouble when they try to define all of the requirements up front, but the reality is that the requirements document is usually insufficient.  Regardless of how much effort goes into it, requirements change during the project and have to be updated.  Agile experts know that if they have the ability to elicit detailed requirements up front then they can also do the same when they actually need the information.  In short, agile professionals strive to truly manage change, not to prevent it.

Course Overview:
Many of today’s Project Management and Business Analyst Professionals are finding themselves leading, managing and analyzing on Agile development teams, only to find that many of the tools and techniques applied when using a traditional project management approach no longer work as effectively or at all. In order to do more than survive in this iterative development environment, today’s Project Manager and Business Analyst must employ additional project management and business analysis tools and techniques to effectively lead their teams and deliver their projects.

Requirements can change frequently during a project, and therefore projects need a streamlined, flexible approach to requirements change management.  People who develop agile requirements want to create systems and services which are both high-quality and high-value, and the easiest way to achieve this is to implement the highest priority requirements first.  This enables the projects to maximize value for their stakeholders.

The course will explore how your projects can easily and successfully manage requirements in an effective Agile environment.

Intended Audience:
Executives, Project Managers, Business Analysts, Business and IT stakeholders working with analysts, Quality and process engineers, technicians, managers; supervisors, team leaders, and process operators; anyone who wants to improve their Business Analysis skills.

Learning Objectives:

• Recognize the roles, tasks, and deliverables for managing Agile requirements
• Develop User Stories, role descriptions, personas and identify stakeholders
• Differentiate between business, stakeholder, solution, and transition requirements
• Utilize Agile modeling and Test Driven Development (TDD) techniques  to analyze and communicate requirements
• Apply an Agile change management process for managing expectations and change
• Assess and verify requirements utilizing an Agile approach

Section 1: Introduction

• Why Agile?
  How to recognize that your organization is heavily regulated, regimented, micro-managed using the waterfall model of development
  What Agile SCRUM can do to address this problem
• The Agile Manifesto
• The Agile Lifecycle
• About Agility
• Roles and Responsibilities

Section 2: Understanding Requirements and Business Rules

• Business, User, Functional, Quality-of-service and implementation requirements
• Requirements vs. specifications
• Requirements vs. business rules
• Risk management and risk response strategies
• Analyzing requirements
• Characteristics of effective requirements

Section3: Agile Requirements Modeling

• Identify high level scope
• Identify initial requirements stack
• Identify an architectural vision
• Plan your iteration
• Iteration modeling
• Model storming
• Test driven development

Section 4: The Agile Change Management Process

• Managing the Solution Scope and Requirements
• Capturing the Requirements Traceability
• Maintaining the Requirements for re-use
• Managing Requirements Conflicts
• Preparing the Requirements Package
• Building the Requirements communications plan

Section 5: Assessing and Validating Requirements

• Validation and verification using an Agile approach
• Creating a master test plan using Agile
• Create test scenarios and test cases from your User Stories

Section 6: Additional Information

• Useful books and links on Managing Requirements using Agile

Download PDF:

BA08-Managing Requirements for Agile Projects – 2 days