Agile and Scrum

This Agile training course offers hands-on practices in Iteration Planning, Product Roadmap and Backlog, Estimating Practices, User Story Development and Iteration Execution.

There is more to Agile development than simply a different style of programming. That is often the easy part. Agile development methods change your approach for requirements gathering, estimation, planning, team development, stakeholder interactions and more. While not a silver bullet, Agile Methodologies have become the most practical way to create outstanding software. We will explore the leading Agile methodologies. You will learn the basic premises and techniques behind Agility — so that you can apply them to your projects.

The classroom will be broken up into Agile teams and your expert instructor will drive each team through the Agile process from planning through execution. Your instructor will answer questions with real-world experience, and you will leave the class with practical knowledge and a clear roadmap for your team's success.

• Why Agile?

Team Exercise: We will explore as a class what problems plague software development so that we can recognize how Agile is an answer to real world problems.

• Becoming Agile
    • Agile Mental Models
    • Agile Manifesto
    • Agile Principles
    • Agile Practices

Team Exercise: Teams will engage in a fun exercise that will reinforce the importance of, and power behind, self-organizing teams. Great teams will not define themselves by their individual roles.

• Building an Agile Team

Team Exercise: We will discuss, as a class what makes a great team based on teams we have participated on that were great.

• Agile Project Planning
    • Vision
    • Roadmap
    • User Roles and Personas

Team Exercise: Teams will practice turning User Roles into full-fleshed personas.

• Backlog Planning
    • Writing User Stories
    • Prioritization
    • Estimating

Team Exercise: Each team will conduct a brainstorming session for creating a product backlog in the form of user stories.
Team Exercise: Teams are tasked with assigning story point estimates to enough user stories to extend at least a few iterations into the future.

• Release Planning

Team Exercise: Teams are tasked with building a release plan by incorporating priority, story point estimates, team velocity and customer/product owner input to assign stories to iterations for the desired release.

• Story Review
  • Iteration Planning

Team Exercise: Teams are tasked with discussing the details of the stories that, based on the estimated team velocity, may be completed in the first iteration.

• Iteration Execution
    • The Daily Scrum
    • Visual Management
    • Agile Metrics

Team Exercise: Taskboards are an invaluable communication tool during each iteration. Each team is tasked with coming up with their taskboard that communicates clearly their commitments for the iteration and progress against those commitments.

• Inspect and Adapt
    • The Iteration Review
    • The Demo
    • The Retrospective

Team Exercise: Teams will discuss what things they can do the day after class ends to take what they've learned and implement it immediately so that they don't lose what they've learned.