Course Overview
TOPAs a ICAgile Certified Professional designation course, this Agile training course offers hands-on practices in Iteration Planning, Product Roadmap and Backlog, Estimating Practices, User Story Development and Iteration Execution.
There is more to Agile development than simply a different style of programming. That's often the easy part. Agile development methods change your approach for requirements gathering, estimation, planning, team development, stakeholder interactions and more. While not a silver bullet, Agile Methodologies have become the most practical way to create outstanding software. We'll explore the leading Agile methodologies. You'll learn the basic premises and techniques behind Agility so that you can apply them to your projects.
The classroom will be broken up into Agile teams and your expert instructor will drive each team through the Agile process from planning through execution. Your instructor will answer questions with real-world experience, and you will leave the class with practical knowledge and a clear roadmap for your team's success.
Scheduled Classes
TOPOutline
TOP- Why Agile?
- Team Exercise: We will explore as a class what problems plague software development so that we can recognize how Agile is an answer to real world problems.
- Team Exercise: We will explore as a class what problems plague software development so that we can recognize how Agile is an answer to real world problems.
- Becoming Agile
- Agile Mental Models
- Agile Manifesto
- Agile Principles
- Agile Practices
- Team Exercise: Teams will engage in a fun exercise that will reinforce the importance of, and power behind, self-organizing teams. As with sports teams, individual roles are important, but even more important is the need to work toward a common goal together. At times that means blurring the lines of traditional roles. Great teams will not define themselves by their individual roles.
- Building an Agile Team
- Team Exercise: We will discuss as a class what makes a great team based on teams we ve participated in that were great.
- Team Exercise: We will discuss as a class what makes a great team based on teams we ve participated in that were great.
- Agile Project Planning
- Vision
- Roadmap
- User Roles and Personas
- Team Exercise: Teams will practice turning User Roles into full fleshed personas.
- Backlog Planning
- Writing User Stories
- Prioritization
- Estimating
- Team Exercise: Each team will conduct a brainstorming session for creating a product backlog in the form of user stories. Each team will present some of their user stories and the instructor will lead discussion about where teams hit the mark and areas for improvement. After some feedback and sharing, each team will take a second pass at creating some user stories.
- Team Exercise: Teams are tasked with assigning a priority to their user stories at the appropriate level of detail.
- Team Exercise: Teams are tasked with assigning story point estimates to enough user stories to extend at least a few iterations into the future. The methods for determining the story point estimates will be Planning Poker and Affinity estimating. Teams will be given enough time to begin to see some consistency in their team and triangulate relative sizing of their stories. Teams are then asked to estimate their team s velocity.
- Release Planning
- Team Exercise: Teams are tasked with building a release plan by incorporating priority, story point estimates, team velocity and customer/product owner input to assign stories to iterations for the desired release.
- Team Exercise: Teams are tasked with building a release plan by incorporating priority, story point estimates, team velocity and customer/product owner input to assign stories to iterations for the desired release.
- Story Review
- Iteration Planning
- Team Exercise: Teams are tasked with discussing the details of the stories that, based on the estimated team velocity, may be completed in the first iteration. As the details are discussed, the tasks will be identified that would be needed to achieve the desired result. Next, with all of the tasks identified, teams assign actual time estimates to the tasks identified. Finally, the team will revisit the sizing of the iteration to determine if they have the appropriate time and resources to meet their commitment.
- Team Exercise: Teams are tasked with discussing the details of the stories that, based on the estimated team velocity, may be completed in the first iteration. As the details are discussed, the tasks will be identified that would be needed to achieve the desired result. Next, with all of the tasks identified, teams assign actual time estimates to the tasks identified. Finally, the team will revisit the sizing of the iteration to determine if they have the appropriate time and resources to meet their commitment.
- Iteration Execution
- The Daily Scrum
- Visual Management
- Agile Metrics
- Team Exercise: Taskboards are an invaluable communication tool during each iteration. Each team is tasked with coming up with their taskboard that communicates clearly their commitments for the iteration and progress against those commitments.
- Inspect and Adapt
- The Iteration Review
- The Demo
- The Retrospective
- Team Exercise: Teams will discuss what things they can do the day after class ends to take what they ve learned and implement it immediately so that they don t lose what they ve learn
Prerequisites
TOPWho Should Attend
TOPBecause this is an immersion course and the intent is to engage in the practices every Agile team will employ, this course is recommended for all team members responsible for delivering outstanding software. That includes, but is not limited to, the following roles:
- Business Analyst
- Technical Analyst
- Project Manager
- Software Engineer/Programmer
- Development Manager
- Product Manager
- Product Analyst
- Tester
- QA Engineer
