Effective Agile Collaboration

Concepts

The Agile framework emphasizes the benefits of working with cross-functional teams and encourage strong communication between business owners who are responsible for providing requirements and user stories. Although the Agile Manifesto emphasized face-to-face communication, for a project to be successful, collaboration must go beyond face-to-face, especially not all team members and stakeholder can always be in the same place at the same time. This course emphasizes collaboration as a project culture that must nurtured and encouraged throughout all phases of the project and beyond. The instructor relies on his experience working with projects of different sizes using different team configurations to broaden the scope of collaboration beyond face-to-face communication.

Participants will learn:

Upon completing this course, participant shall achieve the following learning objectives:

• Understand the difference between communication and collaboration
• Understand the benefits of collaboration in software projects
• Learn how to become a better communicator
• Understand collaboration as a project culture
• Learn how to collaborate with other team members maximize productivity and effectiveness
• Learn how to participate in collaborative requirements and user story reviews
• Learn how to participate in collaborative acceptance criteria and scenario reviews
• Learn how to participate in collaborative test design reviews
• Learn How to participate in collaborative impact analysis

Outline

The Importance of Collaboration

• The Agile Mindset
• The Agile Manifesto
• Communication in the Agile Manifesto
• Collaboration Vs Communication

Communication Before Collaboration

• Overcoming the communication hurdle
• Written communication Vs verbal communication
• Traits of effective communicators
• Becoming an effective communicator

Collaboration as a Project Culture

• Management support
• Collaboration boundaries
• Collaboration policies
• Collaboration mechanisms
• Who should collaborate on what?

Collaboration in distributed Teams

• Considerations of Schedule Differences
• Considerations of Time Zone Differences
• Synchronous Vs Asynchronous collaboration

Forms of Collaboration in Agile Projects

• Collaborative Requirements/User Story Reviews
• Collaborative Acceptance Criteria/Scenarios Reviews
• Collaborative Test Design Reviews
• Collaborative Impact Analysis

Communication Tools

• Individual and group messaging
• Project portals
• Social intranet software

Collaboration Tools

• Chat tools
• Discussion blogs and forums
• Video conferencing
• Collaboration software