Creating Requirements for Agile projects with User Stories

2-day workshop and

Foundations of Agile Development with Requirements, User Stories and Scrum

3-day workshop

What will I learn?

This course provides a practical guide to creating and managing requirements for Agile software development work. While the focus is on the creation of User Stories - the most popular means of capturing requirements for Agile teams - this course takes a broader view of the requirements process.

This 2-day workshop is based around practical requirements exercises with additional lecture material. Previous training in Agile methods – such as Scrum or XP - or experience of Agile development is essential.

In the 3-day version of this workshop additional materials serves to introduce Agile Software Development based on the Scrum/XP model. No previous knowledge of Agile development is assumed in this version. Again exercises are mixed with lecture material.

Attendance is limited to a maximum of 12 people in both versions of this course.

Who should attend?

This course will primarily be of interest to Development Managers and Product Owners (Product Managers, Business Analysts, Systems Analysts, Subject Matter Experts and others filling the role). Project Managers and Architects will also benefit from a better understanding of how requirements are identified and captured.

Software Developers and Testers can also benefit from a better understanding of the requirements process and the thinking behind requirements.

Subjects included

The following topics are covered:
  • Requirements on Agile projects: the 10-Step Model
  • Project goals and business objectives
  • Evolution of requirements and overlapping phases
  • Release plans and project roadmaps
  • The Product Owner role
  • Business Analysts as Product Owners
  • Product Managers as Product Owners
  • Subject Matter Experts as Product Owners
  • Tactical and Strategic Product Owners
  • Project Managers and Product Owners
  • Understanding customer needs
  • Stakeholders, Roles and Personas and why personas are important
  • Creating personas
  • User story format
  • Writing user stories
  • Acceptance criteria and acceptance tests
  • Splitting stories
  • Story fidelity: dirt road to highway
  • Story mapping
  • Alternatives to user stories: Use cases and Planguage
  • Minimally marketable features and Minimally viable products
  • Prioritization: Absolute and Moscow rules
  • Product and Sprint Backlogs
  • Sprint planning, Release plans and Roadmaps
  • Relating requirements and backlogs to burn-down charts, stacked burn-down charts and cumulative flow diagrams
  • Value delivery
  • Managing changing requirements
In additional the 3-day foundation version adds version:
  • Overview of Agile and Scrum
  • Scrum Master and Agile Coach Role
  • Engineering techniques
  • Agile approach to quality
  • Approaches to Testing in Agile
  • Project portfolio management
  • Guide to visual tracking boards and layouts
  • Third party contracts
  • Team structure
  • Team retrospectives and retrospective dialogue sheets

Course materials: All students on this course will receive a copy of course and one of the Agile Reader mini-books. When delivered in-house electronic copies of the slides and a copy of Allan Kelly’s book, Changing Software Development (2008) are also provided.

Workshop leader

This workshop is led by Allan Kelly, an experience software engineer, product owner and development manager who has successfully delivered multiple Agile projects. He holds BSc and MBA degrees, is the author of Changing Software Development: Learning to be Agile (2008, Wiley) and the forthcoming Business Patterns for Software Developers (2012, Wiley).

For more details please contact Software Strategy.