program selection system

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to plan and conduct a series of agile workshops—product roadmap, release plan and iteration requirements workshops—to generate “just enough” requirements-related information at the right time and for the right stakeholder community on large agile projects. This interactive session features lecture, simulation, and discussion. You’ll learn how to get your stakeholders to work together to tackle requirements challenges such as defining your product’s scope and features, developing a workable release strategy, engaging business and technical staff, and more.

For an illustration of these workshops, go to http://www.ebgconsulting.com/3typesOfWorkshops.jpg

Requirements are the foundation of product development. On large, complex agile projects, teams struggle to grasp just enough of the big picture to mitigate the myriad problems that can arise, such as guessing which slice of the product to start or continue building, encountering the need for extensive rework due to undetected architectural dependencies, establishing a viable release strategy for business planning, and suffering from inadequate customer involvement.

Facilitated workshops are a powerful and efficient way to establish your product roadmap, define your release strategy and explore “just enough” iteration requirements. Workshops combine the value you get from “grokking” your product requirements (see http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/grok) with the benefits of using a collaborative process that builds trust, mutual understanding and accountability. These workshops reveal not only user requirements but also quality attributes and technical infrastructure needs that are crucial to large, complex products. You can use workshops to actively engage customers early in the project and provide a framework for making decisions about when and what to build.

The goal of this interactive session is to give you an experience that will help you decide how to use these types of workshops on your own projects. In the simulation, you will initially develop product-level requirements, along with a product roadmap based on a vision statement and background information provided to you. Next, you will expand on your product–level requirements to deliver a requirements-based release plan for the next level of features, taking into account your product’s true business value and any dependencies between the requirements. Finally, you will develop a slice of iteration-level requirements (those requirements to be completed in a given iteration), including defining quality attributes and testing your requirements for completeness.

You’ll gain a toolkit of insider guidelines and real-world requirements practices—reinforced with brief practice sessions and group discussions—that you can apply to improve the quality of your development efforts in large agile projects.