Agile Analysis Boot Camp

Course Description

Agile teams and organizations find out sooner or later, that with agile, building the wrong things faster is very possible if you leave out a key component: understanding the real problem and evaluating the impact of the potential solution before going off and doing your sprint as fast as you can. Our goal is to provide approaches and techniques for your team to ensure the right thing is built, have user stories that clearly identify the minimum viable product, and potentially eliminate unnecessary stories.

The course provides practical guidance on handling complex projects, spontaneous scenarios and decision points that occur on an agile project. Our material covers many variations of agile so that each analysis technique taught can be adapted to different types of projects, different types of agile teams, and even a variety of agile frameworks.

Boot Camp Experience

An immersion learning approach, along with role playing, allows students to practice the techniques as they learn. Students will experience what a project that is fully leveraging agile concepts and culture looks and feels like. This allows them to better understand their role on the team and appreciate their team member’s contributions. During the course, we will demonstrate how analysis is used at every step in the process, even if the techniques are not always recognized as analysis in their current environment.

This course includes many of the concepts found in Scrum and Kanban. It supports the standards outlined in the IIBA BABOK^® Guide V3. This course will also touch upon alternate agile approaches (XP, Iterative, DAD, hybrids such as Scrumban, Scrumfall and other organic approaches) to allow those pursuing agile to consider all the practices and options. Students who have previously taken our Essential Skills for Business Analysis will see how to leverage and reuse those skills in an agile environment.

Learning Objectives

• Practice Scrum, release, and iteration/sprint planning sessions through mock exercises
• Understand how the different agile environments (Scrum, SAFe, Kanban) impact roles, planning, and ceremonies
• Review the top-down hierarchy of managing value
• Align scoping and analysis techniques with each stage and step in the agile framework
• Understand how to best facilitate communication among the agile team (i.e. the product owner, the domain stakeholders, the development team)
• Perform team skills gap analysis to help the team become even more effective and responsive to changes

• Develop user stories using the 3Cs, the features, the epics, and cross-functional supporting content (ie: acceptance test, examples, models) for the purposes of building the right solution and tracing value
• Discuss other types of backlog items including non-functional requirements, spikes, technical debt, and impediments
• Elicit and communicate the appropriate level of requirement detail and how to use “just in time” practices for delivering the details
• Outline the role analysis plays in managing, estimating, and prioritizing the backlog, along with designing, building, and testing activities
• Identify and negotiate the factors associated with ready and done
• Identify supporting artifacts and determine when to introduce them
• Effectively establish a triage approach to manage the flow of changes that is encouraged and to ensure ongoing backlog grooming
• Determine how an analyst is to adjust their practices and techniques due to the changing needs of the team

Intended Audience

This course is designed for anyone working on an agile team, but is especially helpful for product owners, business analysts, systems analysts, or any other team member involved with requirements on an agile project. This course may also be appropriate for individuals who manage individuals working on an agile team and need a more in-depth understanding of the process and skills useful for an agile team.

Prerequisites

None