Agile Practitioner

Prerequisites:

Course Description:

Many companies are now considering or have begun to implement an Agile project framework not only for software systems development but also for pure business change projects. Agile projects involve all organisational roles from senior business project sponsors to junior programmers and other roles outside the project team such as operations and helpdesk staff.

Exercises will be used throughout the course to illustrate the concepts and approach, including a case study based around a typical multi-faceted project.

It is a tenet of Agile projects that all project team members, whether full-time or not, have equal responsibility to the success of the project. Therefore, it follows that all team members need to have a common understanding of the framework and other role contributions.

Agile is a set of common principles and shared techniques amongst several recognised Agile frameworks or methods; an organisation can choose to use just one framework/method or produce a bespoke framework/method based on best practice and terminology from two or more of those available.

This 3 day Agile Practitioner course covers the principles, processes, people and products that Agile practitioners generally subscribe to and gives delegates the opportunity to practice some of the major techniques that will be involved in Agile projects.

It should be noted that the course content does not include any specific technology references or practice.

Who should attend?

Delegates can be from all business and technical roles that will be involved in an Agile project or those that will interact with the project both during the after the project lifetime.

To achieve the greatest impact, this course is best run involving the people about to start an Agile project; the course helps with team building and can identify specific issues that need to be addressed before the project starts.

This course includes the following modules:

Introduction to Agile Development

• History
• Agile Manifesto
• Agile Frameworks
• Agile Principles

Is your project suitable for Agile?

• Factors to consider
• Size
• Criticality
• Personnel and environment

Building the Team

• Roles and Responsibilities
• Multiple roles and effective communication
• Quality Goals
• Sharing of project management

Stakeholder Considerations

• Importance of stakeholders
• User stories
• Envisioning
• Team Vision
• Importance of Scheduling
• Deliverables
• Prototyping

Requirements

• Vision
• Objectives
• High & Low-Level Requirements
• Gathering & Modelling
• Estimating
• Prioritisation (MoSCoW Rules)
• Managing Change

Planning & Managing Project Construction

• Objectives and deliverables of construction Iteration & Increment Management
• Daily Meetings
• Creating and managing the Backlog / Story List Driving the Project with Use Cases
• Estimating work and calculating velocity

Risk Management

• Difference between Agile and Waterfall
• The Risk Lifecycle

Architecture

• Importance of architecture
• What do we architect
• Need for & cost of refactoring

Planning for Quality

• What is quality and how is it measured
• Test driven development
• Test automation
• Coding & testing practices

Communication

• Project internal and external communications

Transition to Agile

• Preparing for change
• Agile Release Planning
• Support responsibilities during and after transition Project closedown