Duration: 2 days

Audience:

• Project managers, people managers, developers, leads, testers, business analysts, etc.
• Teams wanting a deep look into Scrum and why it works

Description:

This course is an excellent way to train up your entire team on Scrum. The course is a fast-paced participative 2-day immersion in Scrum. The course begins by discussing the origins of Scrum, market uptake, and a conceptual view of the methodology. The underlying philosophies of Scrum and Agile are covered in detail including an engaged customer, time-boxing, iterative development, sashimi, collaboration, command & control versus self-organization, trust, transparency, inspect & adapt, and just-in-time planning. The Scrum framework and the Scrum iteration (sprint) are then described using hands-on exercises which allow the attendee to experience how Scrum truly works. Changing requirements and how to manage these using Scrum is presented. All Scrum personnel roles such as Scrum Master, Product Owner, Chickens & Pigs, development team, and customer are described. The artifacts of Scrum are described – product backlog, sprint backlog, burndown chart, and the potentially shippable product increment. Then, the Scrum meetings are described in detail – sprint planning meeting, daily standups, sprint reviews, and sprint reflection. Additional topics are covered such as Scrum scalability, ScrumBut, managing dependencies with Scrum, managing technical debt with Scrum, and the relation of User Stories to Scrum.

The student’s understanding of Scrum is intensified with collaborative participation in many exercises emulating aspects of the entire Scrum framework. The class ends by putting it all together with a full lifecycle project exercise using Scrum.

Note: this course is not a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) course. Instead, it covers all aspects and roles of Scrum for the entire team. The CSM course focuses solely on the ScrumMaster role, while this course explains all roles and responsibilities for the entire Scrum team.

Upon completion of the course, the attendee will be ready to implement the Scrum agile method in his/her organization with confidence.

Duration: 1 day

Audience:

• Customer proxies, product managers, people managers, developers, testers, business analysts, leads
• Teams seeking a better way to elicit and clarify requirements

Description:

Eliciting and managing project requirements is often challenging for product owners and development teams. This course is a comprehensive 1-day immersion into a proven lightweight Agile technique of managing requirements – the User Story. Upon completion, attendees will be ready to introduce or improve their use of User Stories as an excellent means of managing requirements with agility.

User stories are inexpensive, low fidelity, simple, and brief descriptions of functionality from the user’s point of view. The promise of User Stories is that development teams can begin writing and demonstrating working code very early in the project lifecycle. The course covers important topics such as who develops the User Stories, how to find User Stories, how to create User Stories, good versus bad User Stories, how to estimate User Stories, how to measure development team velocity, how User Stories fit into the project lifecycle, managing requirement changes using User Stories, and others.

The course ends with an introspective discussion of the audience’s current challenges and how User Stories can help improve your ability to impact the bottom line. The course is participatory and uses many exercises to instill a deep understanding of how to find, create, manage, track, estimate, and derive velocity of User Stories.

Duration: 2 days

Audience:

• Developers, testers, leads, product managers, people managers, executives, business analysts, etc.
• Teams new to agile or considering agile product development

Description:

This course provides a foundational understanding of what Agile is all about. The course begins with a detailed look into well known software development lifecycle methods. Then, the course introduces Agile Methods as a better way to build software. Empirical data and case studies are used to show the business case for Agile. The Agile Manifesto and agile practices are explored to help the student understand the philosophical underpinnings of this approach and how it is radically different than before. Team exercises are used to experience the new approach firsthand.

Scrum is presented as an example of a popular agile framework. The actual methods of Scrum are described in detail – sprint planning meeting, daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, sprint reflection, and sprint iteration. The artifacts of Scrum are described – product backlog, sprint backlog, burndown chart, and the potentially shippable product increment. Personnel roles such as Scrum Master, Product Owner, Chickens & Pigs, are described. Attendees will participate in a hands-on Scrum-based example project.

At the conclusion of the 2-day course, the attendees will be knowledgeable in Agile Methods and Scrum, ready to make roll-out decisions on organizational transformation.