Audience
Project and programme managers, team leaders, analysts, developers and anyone who will be involved in agile projects.
Prerequisites
A basic understanding of the nature of projects and the techniques used in traditional project management.
Duration
3 days. Lecture presentations are supported by practical exercises which allow discussion, reinforcement of learning and enhancement of the understanding process.
Course Objectives
Traditional software development can be a risky process and will usually provide a project manager with a number of challenges. Uncertainty in estimating, changing requirements, problems with quality, meeting time and budget constraints, the list of potential pitfalls facing a project manager is almost endless. To try and solve or mitigate these problems, many companies are now pursuing an agile development strategy. This course provides participants with an introduction to common agile methods and principles. Following this, the course focuses on Scrum, an iterative incremental process commonly used with agile development.
The objectives of this course are to enable participants to:
- Understand the need for, and principles of, agile methods.
- Recognise the constituent parts of the Scrum method.
- Plan, manage and close a development project using agile practices.
Course Content
Traditional Project Management
What is a Project?
What is Project Management?
What is a Successful Project?
Project Variables.
Project Management Process.
System Development Methods.
Why Do Projects Fail?
Agile Development
The Agile Manifesto.
Agile Manifesto Principles.
Defined and Empirical Processes.
Project Constraints in Agile.
An Agile Approach to Projects.
Working as One Team and in Short Iterations.
Delivering Each Iteration.
Focusing on Business Priorities.
Inspection and Adaption.
Emergent Design.
Continuous Improvement.
Refactoring and Technical Debt.
Continuous Integration.
Introduction to Scrum
Scrum Theory.
Starting Scrum.
Product Backlog.
Sprint Planning.
Sprint Backlog.
Sprint Reviews.
Sprint Retrospectives.
Daily Scrums.
Scrum Roles - ScrumMaster, Product Owner, Dvelopment Team.
Customers and Stakeholders.
Scrum Processes
Initiate.
Plan and Estimate.
Implement.
Review and Retrospect.
Release.
Planning
What Makes a Good Plan?
Planning Failures.
Causes of Planning Failure.
Responding to Change.
Multiple Levels of Planning.
Agile Planning.
Continual Planning.
Release Planning.
Backlog Prioritisation, Risk and Value, MoSCoW, Kano Analysis
Story Mapping.
Financial Prioritisation, Cost Benefit Analysis, Payback Analysis, ROI, NPV.
User Stories
Requirements Gathering.
What Are User Stories?
Levels of Detail.
Story Decomposition.
Splitting User Stories.
Acceptance Criteria, Scenarios and Behaviour Driven Development.
Defining Done.
Collecting Stories.
Advantages of User Stories.
Estimating
Cone of Uncertainty.
Traditional Estimating.
Agile Estimating.
Estimating Duration, Ideal Time and Elapsed Time.
Three Point Estimating, Probability in Estimating.
Estimating by Analogy, Estimating Size with Story Points.
Estimation Scales.
Velocity, Estimating Velocity.
Planning Poker.
Affinity Estimation.
Re-estimating.
Sprints
Sprint Prioritisation.
Sprint Planning.
Sprint Duration.
Tracking Progress.
Burndown and Burnup Charts.
Ideal Line of Progress.
Task Boards.
Sprint Failures.
Backlog Grooming.
Agile Teams
Successful Teams.
Group Dynamics, Tuckman Stages of Group Development.
Conflict Management.
Motivation and Morale
Management Style.
Other Agile Approaches
History of Agile.
eXtreme Programming (XP).
Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM).
Lean Software Development.
Kanban.
Disciplined Agile Delivery.
Implementing Agile
Selecting an Agile Approach.
Using Pilot Projects.
Criteria for Selecting a Candidate Project.
Checklist for Adopting an Agile Method.
Key Project Management Practices in Adopting Agile.
Steps in Implementing Agile Across an Organisation.
Scaling Agile.
Multiple Agile Teams.