Business Analysis in Agile Projects (ICP-APO)

About This Course

Traditional system-development methodologies are rapidly being replaced by more iterative or agile approaches. More and more organizations are realizing the benefits of faster product deployment at a lower cost, with less rework due to missed requirements. Effective business analysis is key to developing those requirements and keeping projects on track. This indispensable course explores the contributions of good requirements development in an Agile environment and equips business analysts with the critical thinking, analytical skills, and necessary people skills they need to add value to every Agile project.

This practical workshop provides participants with an understanding of the changing role of the business analyst, the tools and techniques best suited to Agile, and the timing for performing key tasks and events. Explanatory, demonstrations, and practice exercises will provide you with the experience needed to create user stories that meet business needs.

Course Audence

• Business customer, user or partner
• Project Sponsor or Project Owner
• Business Analyst
• Business Systems Analyst
• Systems Analyst
• Project Manager
• Systems Architect or Designer
• Systems or Application Developer
• QA Professional
• Systems Tester
• Leader of Systems projects or teams
• Anyone wanting to enhance their Agile business analysis skills

Course Objectives

• Evaluate a variety of Agile "flavors"
• Review levels and types of requirements
• Define the roles of Agile project team members
• Practice defining personas
• Work as a team to discover and write user stories
• Review requirements elicitation and discovery methods
• Understand story decomposition and modeling with simple graphical methods
• Practice eliciting and validating information from project stakeholders
• Assess the importance and priority of product features
• Hone your problem identification, definition, and solving capabilites

*Delivered by ASPE, ICAgile Member Organization

Course Outline

1. Getting Started

As we get started we will get to know each other and understand the objectives of the course.  We will introduce the importance of Conversation in the Agile environment and how the Conversation can be managed for better communication and results.  We will model the creation of Working Agreements that contribute to building trust on a team.

• Introductions
• Course Objectives
• Impact of other Domains on Agile Beginnings
• The Agile Conversation
• Working Agreements

2. Agile Overview

You’ve heard it all before: “Agile means developing software without any documentation. Agile means developers decide on a product’s features. Agile is the same thing as Scrum.” Perhaps you’ve heard the most misleading concept of all: “Agile means we don’t do business analysis anymore.” Nothing could be more false.

Learn what Agile really is, what the variations and hybrids of Agile are and how business analysis is critical to project success.

• Lean Beginnings
• Why Agile?
• Agile Manifesto & Principles
• Agile Practices

3. Building an Agile Team

In Agile the Business Analyst has various possible roles from Voice of the Customer or Product Owner, member of the Customer side team or member of the Development side team.  In this section we will explore how to create and effective Agile team with an Agile mindset and then see how the Business Analyst fits into this team framework and provides value.

• The Team as a System
• The Business Analyst

4. Project Initiation

Agile follows an Adaptive, Just-in-Time planning model.  In this section we will learn how Adaptive Planning can better meet the customer’s needs and provide them more value with less resources by only elaborating requirements Just-in-Time.

• Five Levels of Planning
• Vision
• Themes & Roadmap
• User Roles and Personas

5. Backlog Planning

The Agile vehicle of communicating requirements is the User Story.  The Business Analyst is central in the process of writing and elaborating User Stories.  This section will help the Business Analyst learn about User Stories and how to write and elaborate good User Stories.

• The Product Backlog
• Writing User Stories
• Guidelines for Good Stories
• Acceptance Criteria

6. Managing the Backlog

After User Stories are written, they need to prioritized and estimated.  As part of the Customer side team, the BA has a major role in prioritization.  As a member of the Development side team, the BA will contribute in User Story estimation.  Both of these come with low cost, low waste techniques that allow us to do this quickly and get on to the important work of implementing requirements.

• Prioritization
• Estimating

7. Release Planning

The Business needs to know when they will receive product deliverables.  In this section the Business Analyst will learn how milestones are set and how deliverables will be slated for a release with high confidence in meeting dates.

8. Backlog Refinement

Backlog Refinement is where the Business Analyst if really worth her weight in gold.  User Stories represent very thin statements of Customer wants and needs but they don’t contain the details until the development team is close to working on them.  As time to work on them approaches, the details need to be filled in and the Business Analyst is the central figure in requirements elaboration.

• Agile Documentation
• Requirements Elaboration

9. The Iteration

When Requirements are ready to go – ready to go does not mean mountains of documentation.  Much of the details are maintained as tacit knowledge with the Business Analyst and the others who have been involved with the Conversation.  Continued collaboration is essential to turning what we’ve learned about the needs of the customer into working software.  The Business Analyst is always there involved answering real-time questions from the team.

• Iteration Planning
• Iteration Execution

10. Inspect and Adapt

Agile is an Empirical Process for developing complex software.  Essential to and Empirical Process is feedback loops.  Feedback loops can be both formal and more informal.  In this section we will learn about the formal feedback loops that are built into the end-of-iteration timeframe for driving continuous improvement back into the process.

• The Iteration Review
• The Demo
• The Retrospective

11. Agile Adoption

So you want to drive these concepts into your organization as you leave the class and go back to your work.  This section will help you do that effectively.