Whether you’re new to agile or have worked on several agile projects already, this course will help you dramatically improve the efficiency of your requirements process and the effectiveness of your functional tests.

This two day course does more than just cover the topic of Agile Requirements; it is designed to be an immersion experience in the full spectrum of agile practices. For example: instead of a following a course outline, we will create a prioritized iteration plan of learning objectives, which will adapt to change as priorities and circumstances dictate. Each learning objective (student story), will close by executing acceptance tests to ensure the students understand, and have internalized the concepts. The session is highly interactive and engaging, while covering the broad range of inter-related topics: process adaptation, retrospectives, user stories, and functional tests. Real world case studies add valuable insights in how the ideas can be applied to a variety of different situations.

Learning topics include:

• Agile foundations: the core values and principles that drive out all project decisions; what it really means to be agile.
• Upstream and downstream waste: recognizing all forms of waste within a requirements process.
• Radar graphs: visual thinking-tools for assessing how well the requirements process fits a project context.
• Optimization strategies: context driven approach to eliminating waste, and improving the agility of a requirements process
• Continuous improvement: techniques for conducting retrospectives to enable teams to recognize and resolve process problems.
• Span plans: workflow models for generating user stories, and developing a well-organized ‘big picture’ of the target system.
• Test-driven development: as it applies to the full software development lifecycle, and the entire life span of a project.
• Best practices: make functional tests effective requirements specifications and an automated regression safety net.

Unlike most courses that only superficially cover Agile, participants will master agile requirements by learning through immersion how to tune any requirements process to fit their unique set of project characteristics and how to develop full spectrum of inter-related topics:effective user stories and functional tests that are readable, unambiguous, sufficient, and locatable.