Tech Specs Syllabus

Week 1

Requirements in a Lean and Agile World

• Agile and Lean Philosophies**
• Harvard Business Review: Embracing Agile
• Agile Project Management - A Tutorial
• Merging Agile and DevOps
• Why Lean And Agile Go Together
• Lean-Agile Mindset

Week 2

Communicating Business Needs in Lean and Agile Environments

• Key Challenges in Agile Requirements Engineering
• Product requirements documents, downsized
• Cucumber - The world's most misunderstood collaboration tool

Week 3

Indicators That You Don’t Understand Agile Requirements

• Using Cynefin to Prioritize and Analyze Features, User Stories, and Requirements
• Q&A with Dave Snowden on Leadership and Using Cynefin for Capturing Requirements
• Cynefin and Story Splitting

Week 4

Analysis in Lean and Agile Environments

• What Is An AGILE Business Analyst?
• Kanban at Scale – A Siemens Success Story
• How the FBI Proves Agile Works for Government Agencies
• An introduction to Agile Requirements Engineering
• Comparing scaling agile frameworks
• How to approach Business Analysis in a Lean Startup?
• Requirements Discovery for Agile and Lean IT Projects

Week 5

Common Elicitation Techniques and Challenges

• Business Process Analysis for Requirements Discovery
• Not Everything Needs to Be a User Story: Using FDD Features
• Understanding Features, Stories, and Tasks on Visual Studio Online
• Features: An Agile Introduction
• Requirements Envisioning: An Agile Best Practice

Week 6

Tracking Progress with a Question file

• Keep Your Requirements Elicitation on Track by Managing Questions, Answers, and Assumptions in a Central Repository
• The 7 Product Dimensions: A Guide to Asking the Right Questions

Week 7

Identifying and Interacting with Stakeholders

• How to Identify Stakeholders for IT Projects
• Introduction to stakeholder maps
• Agile Modeling: Where Do I Start?
• The Agile Stakeholder Management Framework for Teams, Programs, and Portfolios

Week 8

Agile Requirements: Tips for Stakeholder Interactions / User Story Conversations

• A Fun Guide to Nonverbal Communication and Body Language
• Body Language Expert Keynote Mark Bowden at TEDx Toronto — The Importance Of Being Inauthentic
• Listening Techniques
• Ted Talk: 5 ways to listen better | Julian Treasure
• Assignment 6: Listening Techniques Applied
• Success Criteria for Effective Communication
• Active Stakeholder Participation: An Agile Best Practice

Week 9

Writing Business and Stakeholder Features and Requirements

• User Stories Are Stakeholder Requirements
• Mike Cohn talks user stories at the Norwegian Developers Conference
• useful strategies for breaking down large User Stories (and a cheatsheet)
• Reducing Complexity Increases Comprehension
• Agile Product Owner Role Techniques: Breaking down features

Week 10

Relevance of Features, Requirements, and User Stories

• Avoiding Ambiguity and Subjectivity
• Misunderstandings Kill Projects
• Causes of Requirements Ambiguity
• Revealing and Removing Ambiguity
• Ensuring a Common Understanding
• Agile Product Owner Role Techniques: Acceptance criteria

Week 11

Finding Test Scenarios in a LEAN, AGILE World

• Test Scenarios Are the Ultimate Requirements
• What Continuous Delivery Means for Testers, QA Teams and Software Quality
• What Are Test Scenarios, Test Cases, and Test Outlines Using the Given-When-Then
• Agile Requirements Snail: Feature to User Story to Scenario
• The beginner's guide to BDD (Behavior-Driven Development)
• Using “Given-When-Then” to Discover and Validate Requirements
• Specification-By-Example with Gherkin
• Writing features - Gherkin language

Week 12

Engineering AGILE Test Data

• Driving Development with Tests: ATDD and TDD
• ATDD From the Trenches

Week 13

Discovering Tests Scenarios Using a Use Case

• More Test Scenario Identification Techniques
• Cucumber (Framework) Tutorial
• Functional Solution Requirements Reveal Scenarios