Mastering Requirements for Agile Projects

Body of Knowledge areas: (CSTP #5), (CASTP #2), (CSTAS Elective) Concepts

if you have been working on agile project, you know life is different for everyone. The fast pace nature of agile projects dictates that discovering, managing, implementing, and testing requirements is all done very differently from how a traditional waterfall project do. Bulky requirement documents have no place in agile projects. Some even claim that detailed requirement description is not necessary to start writing design and code. Test professional are, in many cases, faced with the challenge of having to test against incomplete, possibly ambiguous requirements. Also, because requirements typically evolve over time and because of the iterative nature of agile projects, developing and testing against a moving target is also major challenge. Interestingly enough, although this is the norm in agile projects, we found that this is also the case in many other non-agile projects. This course has been designed to help the agile team including product owners, business analysts, tester, and developers deliver systems that meets intended use within the time constraints and the fast pace of agile projects. The course uses a very collaborative iterative approach to discovering and testing requirements. For those project teams, agile or not, who are interested in more formal methods to discover and test requirements, this course also integrates methods such User Stories, Scenarios, and Use Cases into the requirement process.

Who Should Attend

This course is critical for all members of an agile team as well as business analysts and tester in one- agile projects.

Duration

Although this is meant to be a two or three day course, the course is also offer as one-day course. The difference is in the depth of coverage and the amount of hands-on workshops. We suggest as a follow-up course “Designing and Executing Tests in Agile Projects”

Learning Objective

The course aims at achieving the following objectives:

• Understanding the differences between different forms of requirements
• Learning collaborative methods to discover, implement, and test requirements
• Learning how to break requirements and/or User Stories into more manageable, implementable, testable scenarios.
• Effectively maintaining a log of all discussions with respect to User Stories
• Converting scenarios to exploratory tests

Topics to be covered

1. Requirements vs. User Stories
2. Characterizing Agile
3. Managing Backlogs
4. Burn-Down Charts
5. Requirement traceability
6. Requirement-based project management
7. Functional vs. quality requirements
8. Characteristic of "Good" Requirements
9. The Requirement Process
10. From User Stories to Scenarios
11. From Requirements to Scenarios
12. Collaborative Requirement and Scenario Reviews
13. Model based requirements
14. Use Cases