Extended Education

Agile Requirements Management

Agile Requirements Management Course

October 16 2009, Vienna Austria

This course will be taught in English

€700 Regular Pricing, €600 Early Pricing (before 30-SEP)

Note: this is an advanced course. If you are new to agile or Scrum, it is highly recommended that you have attended a Certified ScrumMaster Course or have at least one year of experience working on a Scrum project prior to attending this course.

Software projects start with functionality and requirements. The clarity and quality of the requirements drive the deliverables of the project and set the expectations of customers. Managing requirements can be a challenge because we have been taught to capture all requirements up front, and achieve customer sign off. This process does not allow for change, and all software projects have change. Enter user stories.

Authoring project requirements as user stories is one of the most common approaches across any agile method. In this course, you will learn what a user story is, how to build and author them and how to manage and communicate them to users.

This hands-on, one day course is valuable to all participants of software projects including analysts, project managers, developers, testers and more.

The course format consists of multiple lecture topics, group exercises and group discussion.  Ample time will be devoted to analysis of the “real-world” industry experiences of the instructor based on case study examples and experiences managing agile projects and coaching agile project teams.

Upon completion, you will be able to answer questions like these:

• What is a good user story?
• How do I manage the Product Backlog?
• What are some techniques for gathering stories?
• How does this apply in the "real world"?
• Do we do all stories up front?  

Mitch Lacey is an agile practitioner and trainer. Mitch has been managing projects for over twelve years and has numerous plan-driven and agile projects under his belt.

Mitch honed his agile skills at Microsoft Corporation, where he successfully released core enterprise services for Windows Live. While at Microsoft, he transitioned from Program Manager to Agile Coach, working hand-in-hand with groups throughout their transition to Agile practices. After Microsoft, Mitch was the Agile Practice Manager at Ascentium Corporation where he practiced agility on the projects he ran every day while coaching customers on  agile  practices and lessons on agile adoption worldwide.

As a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) and a registered Project Management Professional (PMP), Mitch shares his experience in project and client management through Certified ScrumMaster courses, Agile coaching engagements, conference presentations, blogs and white papers.

He is the author of “Adventures in Promiscuous Pairing” presented and published at the Agile 2006 conference, “Transitioning to Agile: Key Lessons Learned in the Field” presented and published at the Fall 2007 PMI Global Congress in Atlanta, Georgia and "The Impacts of Poor Estimating - and How to Fix It" presented and published at the winter 2007 SQE Agile development conference in Orlando, Florida. He also presented at Agile 2008 in Toronto Canada on a variety of topics, as well as the Better Software Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada in June 2008.

Mitch is currently under contract with Addison Wesley to publish a book titled "Adopting Agile: 101 Tips for Surviving Your First Year" scheduled for publication in 2009.

This highly interactive certification course is targeted at people who will work in the Product Owner role. It is beneficial for other team members including:

• Project Managers
• Team Leads
• Development Managers
• Product Managers
• Software Architects
• Solutions Architects
• Testers