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WA1984 Real World Agile Training and Courseware

This is not your typical Agile and Scrum 101 course. This course is designed to spend 25% of the time on “What” and “Why” behind Agile and Scrum and 75% on “HOW” you can actually start using it with your team tomorrow! This is TEAM training so ALL roles (including the Business Product Owners) should attend! If you’re interested in learning real world techniques used by dozens of teams then this course is for you! We walk you through an end-to-end lifecycle Agile project journey from Release Planning all the way to Production Release using a sample project or YOUR own.

There is a cost to learning Agile and Scrum by trial and error or simply reading a book, and many other courses focus almost entirely on What and Why with little coverage of actual HOW-TO techniques. Our instructor shares how small, medium and Fortune 500 companies have applied Agile in real world projects along with many Tips, Tricks and Best Practices! This course is a pre-requisite for our other Agile courses.

What you will learn

• Why Agile? A background into its evolution.
• The Agile values and principles
• What is Scrum? Who are the Roles? What is the Process?
• Compare and Contrast Agile and Scrum roles to traditional roles and responsibilities.
• The Agile Lifecycle – Big Picture
• Planning your Release and building the backlog
• Identifying and writing good stories
• Methods for prioritizing and sizing stories
• Sprint 0 – The critical one!
• Sprint Planning and task estimating
• Daily Scrum Meeting
• Sprint Review and retrospective
• The pre-release sprint
• Why Agile and Scrum are Adopted
• How Agile can fail!

Audience

Project Managers, Team members (developers, testers, BAs, DBAs, etc.), business users and Product Owners are all invited to learn the core skills they will need to be on an Agile team.

Duration

3 Days

Course Outline

I. Agile Introduction and Overview

• The Traditional Process
• Why Agile
• Agile Methods
• Agile Benefits
• Basics of Agile

Workshop: Teams will participate in a Pennies Exercise to demonstrate a transition from traditional to Agile methods.

II. The Agile Team

• Agile Team Characteristics
• Self-organizing teams
• Roles & Responsibilities
• Management Role
• Expectations

III. The Agile Planning Framework

• Agile Planning
• 6 Levels of Planning
• Agile Release Lifecycle
• Establishing Product Vision

Workshop: Teams will determine an appropriate project to work on throughout the course. Teams will then create a Vision Box to initiate the project and establish a common vision across the team.

IV. Understanding the Customer

• Thinking like the User
• User Roles
• Customer Personas

Workshop: Teams will identify user roles and personas for their project to help understand customer needs, priorities and goals.

V. Product Roadmap

• Product Themes / Feature Groups
• Use Case Diagrams
• Roadmaps
• Focus Exercise

Workshop: Teams will create product themes for their project by mapping out a use case diagram of a customer persona.

VI. Creating the Product Backlog

• User Stories
• U-INVEST Model
• Non-Functional Stories
• Acceptance Criteria
• What makes a good story (sizing and substance)
• Story Writing Techniques

Workshop: Teams will create a product backlog by writing user stories they break down from product themes and features.

VII. Breaking Down EPICs

• Compound vs. Complex Stories
• How to Break Down Large Stories
• What Stories are not

Workshop: Teams will break down a few of their large stories, or Epics, into smaller stories.

VIII. Prioritizing the Product Backlog

• Methods for prioritizing
• Business Value Points
• Sequencing Charts / Dependency Diagrams
• Expectations for Prioritizing Stories

Workshop: Teams will prioritize their backlog utilizing Business Value pointing to determine the relative priority of each story.

IX. Sizing Stories

• Actual vs Relative estimating
• Story Points
• Planning Poker
• Complexity Buckets

Workshop: Teams will size the stories in their backlog in story points using the Complexity Buckets technique.

X. Release Planning

• What is Release Planning
• Utilizing velocity
• Sprint 0
• Pre-Release Sprint
• Communication

Workshop: Teams are tasked with building a release plan by incorporating priority, story point estimates, team velocity and customer/product owner input to map stories to appropriate sprints with desired release points.

XI. Story Elaboration

• Getting to the details
• Pre-planning session
• Acceptance Tests
• Agile Modeling examples

XII. Sprint Planning

• Sprint Planning Preparation
• Capacity Planning
• Task breakdown
• Definition of "done"
• Realistic Commitments

Workshop: Teams will plan out their first sprint by determining the team capacity, breaking down their top stories into tasks based on their “Definition of Done”, estimating in ideal hours and committing to a realistic sprint goal.

XIII. Sprint Execution

• Daily Standup (Daily Scrum)
• Task boards
• Agile Tools

XIV. Closing out the Sprint

• Sprint Reviews
• Retrospectives
• Demos

XV. Adopting Agile Methods

• Tips for Getting Started
• Implementation Strategies
• Agile Fail Points
• Overcoming Resistance
• Sample Agile Calendar
• Burn-down, burn-up and other metrics
• Scaling Agile

Workshop: Teams will build a task board showing their planned sprint. Teams will then run a Standup meeting to identify potential dysfunctions.

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