Creating Requirements for Agile projects with User Stories

2-day workshop introducing

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 includes mixes lecture material with practical exercises to help students understand and practise requirements capture.

Who should attend?

This course will primarily be of interest to Product Owners (Product Managers, Business Analysts 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.

Previous training in Agile methods – such as Scrum or XP - or experience of Agile development is assumed. A brief introduction to Agile can be added on request.
Attendance is limited to a maximum of 16 people.

Subjects included

The following topics are included:
• Requirements on Agile projects
• Project goals
• Evolution of requirements and overlapping phases
• Release plans and project roadmaps
• The Product Owner role
• Rights and responsibilities
• Business Analysts as Product Owners
• Product Managers as Product Owners
• Tactical and Strategic Product Owners
• Project Managers and Product Owners
• Understanding customer needs
• Stakeholder identification
• Techniques for gathering requirements
• Inventing for the customer
• Analysis techniques (SWOT, 5 Forces, etc.)
• Personas
• Why personas are important
• Creating personas
• User stories
• User story format
• Writing user stories
• Splitting stories
• Alternatives to user stories
• Use cases
• Planguage
• Minimally marketable features
• Prioritization
• None functional requirements
• Design constraints
• Option thinking
• Role of IT in business change
• Calculating value (ROI, etc).
• Value delivery
• Changing requirements and project governance
• Project portfolio management
• Overview of Agile development (by request)

Course materials: Students on this course will receive, a copy of course notes plus a copy of Allan Kelly’s book, Changing Software Development (2008).

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 is the author of the book Changing Software Development: Learning to be Agile (2008), he holds BSc and MBA degrees and is PRINCE2 Practitioner certified.

Fore more details please contact Software Strategy.