03.Agile Requirements, Story Splitting, Release Planning, Forecasting and Metrics

Among the leading causes of project failure are unclear or poorly defined requirements. In addition, many projects are set up for failure due to being drastically underestimated from the start.  This training course addresses both of these issues head on!  First, we focus on the processes of requirements gathering, communication and coordination in an Agile environment.  We will discuss strategies for organizing requirements into categories and hierarchies. We will cover visual modeling and tips on how to engage stakeholders. We will discuss rolling wave planning and how to decompose high-level requirements into lower-level User Stories.  We will construct our “Definition of Ready” to ensure that our requirements are captured correctly, and practice Story Splitting to chop big requirements down into bite-sized– but still valuable and business-understandable chunks.  Finally, we will explore techniques for creating tests that help us ensure we have captured requirements completely and correctly.  Second, this training course provides a deep dive into Agile forecasting, release planning, and metrics.  We will explore different methods for prioritization and estimation, and how probabilistic methods can be used to provide highly reliable estimates that get better and better over time.  We will also review techniques like reference class forecasting, which can be used even in situations where we have very little information.   This class is for all project stakeholders including subject matter experts, business analysts, project managers, developers, and testers.  No matter which Agile method you are practicing: Scrum, Kanban, eXtreme Programming, or something else, this 1-day overview can dramatically improve your chances of success!