Course Description

This 2-day Agile Business Analysis training course addresses the common problem that most Agile approaches tend to focus on product delivery, while assuming that a prioritised “backlog” of product features is readily available to drive development activities. However, Agile can be rather vague about how the product backlog is initially populated with features.

This has led to uncertainty about the role of business analysis in the Agile world. It is clear that the traditional specification-driven approach to business analysis is not compatible with Agile but many teams struggle to find a replacement.
This course addresses one of the least understood aspects of agile by teaching a comprehensive set of “discovery” techniques that complement the Agile “delivery” approaches. At the end of the course, participants will have a clear understanding of the role of a Business Analyst in an Agile team.

Course Features

  • Incorporates the IIBA’s agile framework as described in the Agile Extension to the BABOK Guide.
  • The centre piece of the course is the Agile Discovery Canvas which provides a simple, collaborative tool for guiding agile business analysis.
  • The course is suitable for organisations considering adopting agile techniques, business analysts joining an agile team for the first time and existing agile team members.
  • Taught by a certified Scrum Master.
  • Shows how business analysis can be added to Scrum without creating a “Scrum-But”.
  • Emphasises a collaborative approach to business analysis.
  • Requires no prior knowledge of Scrum or agile techniques.

Participant Benefits

  • Presents a toolbox of business analysis techniques that reinforce agile principles.
  • Develops the skills Business Analysts require to become productive members of agile teams.
  • Presents a dogma-free perspective of business analysis in an agile environment.
  • Dispels many myths and misunderstandings concerning business analysis and the agile approach.
  • Gives participants the knowledge required to fully evaluate an agile approach to business analysis.

Who Should Attend

  • Scrum Masters, Product Owners and Scrum Team Members
  • Business Analysts, Business Systems Analysts, Systems Analysts, Functional Analysts
  • Software Development Managers, Software Engineers, Software Developers, Requirements Engineers, Requirements Analysts
  • Test Managers, Test Engineers, Testers, Quality Assurance Staff
  • Project Sponsors, Project managers, Program Managers
  • Chief Information Officers (CIO), Executives, Enterprise Architects
  • Process Engineers, Software Engineering Process Group (SEPG) Staff, Methodologists, Process Improvement Staff

Course Duration

  • 2 days full-time.

Course Agenda

Introduction to Agile Development
  • Problems with the waterfall life cycle model
  • Project vs. product perspectives
    • Plan-driven development
    • Value-driven development
  • Agile software development
    • The Lightweight approaches of the 1990s
    • The manifesto for agile software development
    • Some popular agile methods
      • Scrum
      • Kanban
      • Lean
  • Introduction to Scrum
    • The Scrum life cycle
    • Scrum roles
      • Product Owner
      • Scrum Master
      • Team
Agile Business Analysis
  • The Product Owner role
    • Defines the product vision
    • Manages scope
    • Responsible for return on investment (ROI)
    • Interacts with stakeholders
    • Accepts (or rejects) sprint outcomes
  • IIBA’s Agile extension to the BABOK Guide
  • Frameworks
    • Discovery framework
    • Delivery framework
  • Discovery principles
    • See the whole
    • Think as a customer
    • Analyse to determine what is valuable
  • Delivery principles
    • Get real using examples
    • Understand what is doable
    • Stimulate collaboration and continuous improvement
    • Avoid waste
  • The agile Business Analyst
    • The Product Owner role
    • Business analysts and the Product Owner
      • Acts as the Product Owner
      • Surrogate for the Product Owner
      • Assists the Product Owner
      • Coaches the Product Owner
    • Business analysts and product acceptance
      • Defines acceptance criteria prior to delivery
      • Creates and executes acceptance tests
    • Other Roles
      • Facilitates stakeholder consensus
      • Ensures business value is delivered
      • Ensures requirements are comprehensive
  • Agile business analysis techniques
    • Collaborative games
    • Cards and sticky notes
    • Affinity analysis
    • Dot voting
Discovery Framework
  • Visual thinking canvases
    • Business model generation
    • Value proposition design
  • The agile discovery canvas
    • The four key discovery questions
    • The principles of agile business analysis
  • Canvas vs. process
  • Canvases as a collaboration tool
Identifying Stakeholders
  • Using ‘MACROSCOPE’ to identify stakeholders
  • The ‘onion’ model of stakeholders
  • Empathy Maps and Personas
  • Involvement vs. commitment
  • Analysing stakeholders
    • Identifying the Product Owner
    • Identifying subject matter experts
    • Other stakeholders
Defining Business Scope
  • The Activity Triangle
    • Activity and objects
    • Activities and outcomes
    • The role of tools
  • Decomposing activities
  • Collaborative Activity Modelling
    • Brainstorming activities
    • Grouping activities
    • Consolidating stakeholder perspectives
    • Defining scope
  • Identifying Business Capabilities
    • Rewording activities as capabilities
    • Levels of business capability
    • Linking business capabilities
      • Organisation structure
      • Business processes
      • IT systems
    • Developing a Capability Map
    • Capability Heat Maps
  • Investigating Value Streams
Analysing Business Needs
  • Classifying Business Needs
    • Strategic needs
      • Build on or preserve a strength
      • Remedy a weakness
      • Exploit an opportunity
      • Avoid a threat
      • High value drivers
    • Operational needs
      • Managing information
      • Enforcing business rules
      • Lower value drivers
  • Identifying strategic needs
    • SWOT analysis
    • Acting on SWOT
      • Improve a capability
      • Mitigate a risk
      • Remedy a weakness
  • Developing a value proposition
    • Stakeholder pains and gains
    • Value stream pains and gains
  • Identifying information needs
    • Collecting information samples
    • Deferring detailed analysis
  • Identifying business rules
    • Identifying business rules through exploratory testing
    • Recovering business rules from source code
    • The business rules mantra
    • Developing a glossary of terms
  • Performing a gap analysis
Defining the Solution
  • Identifying solution features
    • What is a software feature?
    • Describing features using natural language
      • Capabilities
      • Constraints
  • Describing solution features with user stories
    • User story template
    • Sub-stories
    • Decomposing epic stories
    • Acceptance criteria
    • Other stories
      • Team stories
      • System stories
      • Constraint stories
    • The three ‘Cs’ of user stories
      • Card
      • Conversation
      • Confirmation
    • ‘INVEST’ and user story quality
  • Populating the product backlog
  • Estimating and prioritising the product backlog
    • Checking product backlog quality with ‘DEEP’
    • Playing planning poker to estimate relative effort
    • Estimating feature value with ‘SPIRACISEC’
    • Prioritising solution features
    • Ranking the product backlog
Planning Product Delivery
  • Solution vision
    • Elevator pitch
    • Product box
  • Release planning with user story maps
  • Developing a solution roadmap
  • Prototypes and storyboards
  • Wizard of Oz testing
  • Just Enough Architecture
    • Big design up front (BDUF) vs. just enough design
    • Technical debt
    • Architecture proof of concept (spike)
Delivery Framework
  • The Scrum Life Cycle
    • Viewing discovery as ‘iteration 0’
    • Sprint planning
    • Sprint
      • Elaborating requirements
      • Product backlog refinement
      • Daily scrum meetings
    • Sprint reviews
    • Retrospectives
  • Sprint planning
    • Estimating the product backlog in detail
    • Team velocity
    • Creating the sprint backlog
  • Managing the sprint
    • The sprint board
    • Burndown charts
  • Elaborating requirements during the sprint
    • Participate in conversations
    • Behaviour driven development (BDD)
    • Acceptance test driven development (ATDD) and specification by example
    • Automated test frameworks
  • Product backlog refinement
  • The daily scrum
  • Conducting a sprint review
  • Participating in a retrospective